PRIVATE BUSINESS

London Local Authorities (Shopping Bags) Bill ( By Order)

Order for Second Reading read.
	 To be read a Second time on Thursday 30 October.

ORAL ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS

BUSINESS, ENTERPRISE AND REGULATORY REFORM

The Minister of State was asked—

National Minimum Wage

Elliot Morley: What representations he has received on the effects on the observance of the national minimum wage of employers who overcharge migrant workers for accommodation.

Patrick McFadden: Within the minimum wage there is an allowable accommodation offset, currently set at £4.46 a day. It is considered every year by the Low Pay Commission, and representations on its level are normally directed at the commission.

Elliot Morley: I thank my hon. Friend for that answer. Does he agree that although foreign workers, particularly from the EU countries, are an essential part of our economy, it is not acceptable for employers to undercut local employment by abusing the minimum wage, accommodation charges and charges to transport workers to and from their place of work? That has been a problem in Lincolnshire in relation to rogue gangmasters, but it is not confined to them. Can he assure me that such issues will be cracked down on, and that the people responsible will be punished?

Patrick McFadden: My right hon. Friend makes a very good point. The minimum wage has been in place for a decade now, and there is no excuse for the practices that he sets out. With that in mind, the Government have allocated extra support to enforcement of the minimum wage—some £3 million more a year—but we are also changing the law through the Employment Bill, which is currently before the House. It will increase the arrears for any employee who is not paid the minimum wage and stiffen the penalty regime against the employer who does not pay it. Those measures are absolutely right and in the interests of both low-paid workers and the vast majority of good businesses that obey the law and treat their workers decently.

Tony Baldry: How many prosecutions have there been of employers who have abused the minimum wage and exploited workers in this way?

Patrick McFadden: Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, which recovers arrears on the minimum wage, has up to now placed its emphasis on that and recovers several million pounds a year, so there have been relatively few prosecutions. One change that we are making in the Employment Bill is to give the enforcement officers extra powers. The Opposition did table some amendments on the matter, but I am glad that they did not press them to the vote.

Andrew Miller: When I was undertaking research for my private Member's Bill on temporary and agency workers I came across such scams day in, day out. Some of them are covered by current legislation and some will need fresh regulation. Can my hon. Friend assure me that now that the agency workers directive is in force—it came into force this week—the Government will implement the necessary changes to enforce it?

Patrick McFadden: The agency workers directive is not yet in force, but it has been agreed. Of course, that agreement was made possible in part by an agreement reached in this country between business and employee representatives on how to take it forward. That has been reflected in the directive, which represents a much better deal for the United Kingdom than previous drafts of the directive that have been discussed in recent years.

Richard Ottaway: But does the Minister agree that the biggest influence on wage levels is the supply of labour? Under the circumstances, does he agree with the immigration Minister that immigrant labour should not replace indigenous labour?

Patrick McFadden: I think that migrant workers from other countries have made a very significant contribution to economic growth in this country in recent years. When it comes to the future, we have the new points-based system. The idea behind that is precisely to match the demands of the labour market with migrants coming from other countries.

Phil Wilson: What steps is my hon. Friend's Department taking to promote employment rights to the low-paid and increase their awareness of the minimum wage?

Patrick McFadden: My hon. Friend makes a very good point. We will spend some £850,000 on minimum wage awareness over the next year, which will include advertising on radio and efforts to communicate with migrant workers who, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Mr. Morley) said, can sometimes be subject to exploitation in this area. It will also include direct mail to employers to ensure that they are aware of the rates, which were increased on 1 October.

Post Office Network

Henry Bellingham: When he next expects to meet the National Federation of SubPostmasters to discuss the future of the post office network.

Patrick McFadden: The Secretary of State met the general secretary of the National Federation of SubPostmasters on 15 October to discuss a range of matters relating to the future of the post office network. I have had regular contact with the federation since I came into the job 16 months or so ago, and I will continue to do so.

Henry Bellingham: The Minister will be aware that the branch network in East Anglia, and west Norfolk in particular, has been devastated. The one crystal clear message we hear from the remaining sub-post offices is that they are determined to keep the Post Office card account. I asked the Under-Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, the hon. Member for Dudley, South (Ian Pearson), about that yesterday. Although he was sympathetic, he basically said, "Not me, guv. It is down to Ministers at the Department for Work and Pensions." Will the Minister of State and the newly ennobled Business Secretary get a grip of this matter, and give a clear guarantee that the Post Office card account will be kept?

Patrick McFadden: I understand the value of the Post Office card account to the post office network; the general secretary of the National Federation of SubPostmasters has made his views on that clear. I stress what my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions said to the House on Monday—this decision is subject to competitive tendering, no decision has yet been made and it will be made in the proper way.

Albert Owen: My hon. Friend will be aware that many MPs in Wales have been trying to work with the federation and local government to sign an accord providing for more council services to go through the post office network. Can he tell the House what progress has been made on that, given that he hosted the first meeting? Does he agree that if we are to have a sustainable network, we need local authorities to invest in local communities through the post office network?

Patrick McFadden: Local authorities will always want to consider the outlets for their services, and that will include post offices. For example, most local authorities offer people a range of ways in which to pay bills and the option of paying council tax online. That reflects the changes that people are making in their lives and the decline of business in the post offices in recent years. Of course, even after the current closure process is completed, the Post Office will still have an unmatchable reach in urban and rural communities, involving many more than 11,000 branches. That is a valuable asset to anyone interested in delivering services and reaching local communities.

Peter Luff: If, in the next few days, Post Office Ltd confirms its initial proposal to close Bengeworth post office in my constituency, it will entirely forfeit my confidence in its common sense and commercial judgment. However, if the Post Office card account is not awarded to Post Office Ltd, many more post offices in my constituency and around the country will face closure. In the context of the Government's understandable concern about small businesses, may I remind the Minister of the crucial role that rural sub-post offices play for many struggling small businesses?

Patrick McFadden: The Chairman of the Select Committee on Business and Enterprise makes a good point about the value of post offices to small businesses. He again mentioned the Post Office card account, but I cannot go any further than my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, who told the House on Monday that this decision would be taken in a proper way, and that when there is an announcement to be made, we will make it.

Mark Todd: I return to the impact of the possible loss of the Post Office card account. The Post Office has a poor record of tendering competitively for these sorts of services. I hope that the Minister has ensured that those in the Post Office who are preparing its tender have emphasised the network's strength, not in terms of its numbers, because PayPoint outnumbers it now, but in terms of its proximity to the communities that it seeks to serve with the benefits that would be distributed through the card account.

Patrick McFadden: I am sure that all the bidders for this work, including the Post Office, will have tried to maximise the strengths of their bid by pointing out the strengths of their network. As I say, I appreciate the value of the card account to the post office network. When we have an announcement to make on this matter, it will be made.

Robert Smith: The Minister has recognised that the Post Office has an unmatchable reach. If that is the case and if the card account contract is not given to the Post Office, our constituents will get a poorer service from whatever the replacement is. His Department has said that it wants to make life easier for small business and that it wants to speed up payments and everything else. Surely it needs to speed up decision making, because small businesses need to make investment decisions. If people do not know whether they are going to get the card account contract, how can they plan for the future of their local sub-post office?

Patrick McFadden: I appreciate the hon. Gentleman's impatience and I know that the House is keen to hear the results of the tendering process. When we have made a decision on this, I can assure the hon. Gentleman that it will be announced in the normal and proper way.

David Drew: I hear what my hon. Friend says and it was interesting to hear what his colleagues at the DWP have said. Does he realise that the Post Office has wonderful opportunities in these times of financial crisis? In particular, an opportunity is presented by the credit union movement. Will he go back to the federation and to the Post Office to see what opportunities there are for launching the credit union movement nationally by using post offices so that our constituents have safe ways to save and borrow?

Patrick McFadden: My hon. Friend makes a good point. The Post Office has seen increasing success in offering financial services over the past couple of years, and not only in the area he mentions: the Post Office is now the leading retailer of foreign currency in the country, is expanding in insurance and offers deposit savings that I understand have been quite popular in recent months.

John Thurso: I hope that we can all agree on the importance of the Post Office network to all communities, particularly rural communities. As has been mentioned, the renewal of the Post Office card account will be vital to maintaining footfall. In that regard, is the Minister aware of the recent press speculation that the contract is to be split between Post Office Ltd and a number of other suppliers? Is he also aware that most sub-postmasters would regard that as the final nail in their coffin? Will he take the opportunity to reassure them?

Patrick McFadden: I am aware of all sorts of speculation; whether it is wise to comment on it is another matter. I am certainly aware of the value of the card account to the post office network, but as I have said, the decision will be taken in the proper way by the Department for Work and Pensions. When a decision is reached, it will be announced in the normal way.

Andy Reed: In Loughborough, we have already gone through the closure programme, having lost four post offices. I would like to press the Minister on the level of compensation that is paid and whether there is any flexibility. A constituent of mine who had a post office and a Chinese food business that served the Chinese community at Loughborough university in particular feels that the amount of compensation in relation to the length of his lease is not adequate. Is there any flexibility in the scheme? Is there any hope that my hon. Friend can give to me as I go back to that constituent next week to try to sort the matter out?

Patrick McFadden: The compensation for sub-postmasters leaving the network as a result of the closures over the past year was negotiated with the National Federation of SubPostmasters. On the whole, the system of compensation is generous, which is quite right; it is paid in recognition of the very valuable contribution that those sub-postmasters have made to local communities over the years.

Jonathan Djanogly: Given that there are some 4 million users of the Post Office card account, equating to some 10 per cent. of sub-postmasters' net income, are not the Government slightly ashamed that they continue to delay the tender process for POCA's replacement? Will the Minister explain why the delays continue, and tell us when the announcement will be made and certainty given to customers and staff of the Post Office?

Patrick McFadden: We are certainly not ashamed. We have put large financial sums into supporting the Post Office network: some £150 million a year. Without that level of subsidy, thousands more branches would be under threat because the Post Office is losing £500,000 a day and has lost 4 million customers a week in recent years. The decision on the card account will be taken in the proper way by colleagues at the DWP and, when we are ready, it will be announced in the normal and proper way.

David Taylor: In terms of his admiration for the private sector, the last Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform was known to be on our party's right wing, but the present one seems to be off the pitch and somewhere in the directors' box. Can my hon. Friend tell me whether he thinks that Lord Mandelson's inclination towards part-privatisation will go down well with the National Federation of SubPostmasters when next he meets it?

Patrick McFadden: I think that the Secretary of State will do a great job on the pitch. It is always good for a team to have its best players on the pitch. He has been on loan to another team, but I am glad that he is back playing a proper role. My hon. Friend's question refers more to the Hooper review, which will report shortly.

Construction Industry

Robert Goodwill: What assessment he has made of the economic condition of the building and construction industry.

Ian Pearson: The global credit crunch is affecting all economies, including the UK. Overall, the construction industry is experiencing a significant downturn in activity, but some sectors are faring better than others. The housing and commercial sectors are being hit hardest. However, the outlook for other parts of the industry is more positive due to major programmes of work such as Crossrail, the Olympics and the Building Schools for the Future programme.

Robert Goodwill: The Minister mentions the Chancellor's solution to the problem, which is to bring forward major infrastructure and construction projects—a massive spending splurge paid for by a borrowing splurge. But does he really think that that will address the problems facing small construction companies, especially in the housing sector, that are facing problems this week and this month?

Ian Pearson: As I said, the housing and commercial sectors are among the hardest hit at the moment. We announced a package of measures on 2 September, some of which will help the housing sector. I would have thought that the Opposition would want to welcome the bringing forward of infrastructure investment, because such investment is important for the UK's long-term future and, if we can speed up the investment process, it will create new jobs for prime contractors and down through the construction supply chain. That will be valuable at this difficult economic time and will be welcomed by those who work in the construction industry.

Danny Alexander: I am sure that the Minister is concerned about the fate of house builders across the UK. In that context, is he aware that house builders in Scotland face particular problems from rule changes introduced by the Scottish Government, which require housing associations to borrow a greater proportion of money for new affordable housing developments from the private sector? That is reducing the scope for such developments and making matters worse for the house building sector. Will he raise that with Ministers in the Scottish Government to ensure that the entire UK house building industry is given the boost that it needs?

Ian Pearson: I note what the hon. Gentleman says. As he will be aware, that is a devolved matter, but I hope that the Scottish Government would recognise, as the UK Government do, that the housing sector is an important part of the UK economy, and regulation needs to be proportionate and appropriate. We do not want regulation that gets in the way of construction projects that need to continue at this point in time.

Tony Lloyd: My hon. Friend mentions the need for regulation to be proportionate and appropriate. Even in the good times, the construction industry makes use of false self-employment, which often leaves people unprotected and uninsured. Construction also suffers from high levels of health and safety risks. Now there is a downturn and competition is tight, those problems will increase, so can he make the regulatory agencies aware of the need for extra vigilance to protect people employed in that industry?

Ian Pearson: My hon. Friend makes a good point about health and safety issues in the construction sector. As he will be aware, we already have rigorous inspection regimes and it is important that we continue to be vigilant in regulating the construction sector. It is done through a risk-assessment methodology, and that is the right approach.
	The broader point is that during these difficult economic times, it is right for the Government to want to invest in major construction projects that will bring long-term benefits to the UK economy, and that is what we will continue to do with programmes such as Building Schools for the Future and the new hospitals project. Only this week, we saw the 100th new hospital build implemented. Those programmes are important for the UK economy and we need to continue to make progress with them.

Mark Prisk: Many construction firms are facing a double whammy with projects being cancelled on the one hand and credit being withdrawn on the other. What they need, investment plans notwithstanding, is help with their cash flow. Given that, and given the potential appalling impact on jobs in that sector and in those sectors that rely on it, why are the Government refusing to let small firms defer their VAT payments? After all, they did it for farmers in 2001. Why will they not help builders now?

Ian Pearson: I would be very interested if the hon. Gentleman could give us the cost of his VAT deferral proposal—

Alan Duncan: Zero.

Ian Pearson: I do not accept that suggestion from a sedentary position.
	Obviously, we will consider all representations, but the Conservative party's policy, as I understand it, is to say that it wants a 1 per cent. cut on national insurance and it wants a VAT payment holiday. It will pay for that by cutting tax reliefs, but those reliefs are important to businesses and to their long-term investments, so I do not think that that is a responsible strategy. The simple fact of the matter is that the Government have taken action to recapitalise banks and to ensure that banks will continue to make available competitive lending to small businesses. I would like to think that that would be widely welcomed.

Adrian Bailey: May I reinforce the Minister's point? In constituencies such as mine, many jobs are dependent on the Government's sustaining their public sector investment. Will the Minister assure me that he will do everything within his power to press the appropriate ministries to sustain that investment in the coming years?

Ian Pearson: Yes, I can give my hon. Friend that assurance. The public sector construction market is hugely important given that it counts for about 40 per cent. of the industry's total output. At this point in time it would be grossly irresponsible to do anything other than to continue to seek strong investment in our national infrastructure. The public sector can lead the way in continuing to ensure that there is strong demand and that there are jobs in the construction sector. That is the responsible thing to do in difficult economic times. To suggest that we should cut that investment, which is what the Opposition seem to want to do, or to reject our proposals to do more, would not be welcomed by the public, who are concerned about construction jobs and about jobs more generally in our economy.

Small Businesses

Adrian Sanders: What steps his Department is taking to help small businesses in town centres and ensure that shop premises do not remain vacant.

Ian Pearson: The Government are committed to supporting small businesses, including shops, which play an important part in local communities. Yesterday, we announced a cross-Government package of support that focuses on the things businesses have identified as top priorities: cash flow, access to finance and training for staff. We will also continue to promote policies to support vibrant town centres.

Adrian Sanders: There are about 500 empty businesses in my local authority area and that number is rising. It is customers with money in their pockets who keep shops open and the best way to that end is to have decently paid jobs and good inward investment, but the biggest barrier to investment in my area is transport links. The Government have said that they want to bring forward infrastructure projects. Will the Minister give his support to bringing forward the Kingskerswell bypass linking Torbay to the motorway and dual carriageway network? The absence of that link is the biggest barrier to investment that my constituents face.

Ian Pearson: I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will want to raise that transport issue at an appropriate point in Transport Question Time. His general point, however, is important, and it is about what we can do to help people and businesses during difficult economic times. The best thing that we can do is to continue to provide a package of support for small businesses that are going through difficult times. That is why we made the announcement that we did yesterday. In this difficult macro-economic climate, we need to take some fairly fundamental decisions about borrowing, too, and that is what the Government are doing.

Julie Kirkbride: In his answer, the Minister rightly pointed out that cash flow is a big issue for small businesses. However, although there may have been argument in favour of empty property taxes in the boom times, does he accept that they compound the problem in the down times? Will he reconsider the matter, to help small businesses and others to get through this difficult period?

Ian Pearson: As the hon. Lady will be aware, both the Barker and Lyons reviews suggested that we should end vacant property relief, and that is what happened in April. That relief was regarded as a £1.3 billion subsidy for owners of commercial property, and not for the small and medium-sized businesses that are the backbone of this country's economy. We need to help small and medium-sized businesses, and that is the focus of the package that the Government announced this week. That package has been welcomed by the CBI, the Federation of Small Businesses and the British Chambers of Commerce. I hope that the Opposition will welcome it too.

Patrick Cormack: Barker and Lyons reported before the recession. What we need from the Government is specific action now, not mere generalities and platitudes. One specific thing that is within the Government's power is to suspend the rates on empty properties. Will the Minister do that, and do it now?

Ian Pearson: I can understand that the hon. Gentleman feels passionate about this issue. We are going through challenging economic circumstances: it looks as though we have tougher times ahead, and the best thing that I can say is that we need a Government who are on the side of hard-working people. We are providing help for small businesses with health checks, training support and business advice. In addition, the Government are a huge purchaser and we have said that we will ensure that we will pay our bills promptly. We are introducing all those measures at the moment, and a range of other measures is already available through the Business Link programme. The Government are committed to ensuring that support for business continues to be delivered effectively.

Alan Duncan: This may be the first occasion on which a Minister of Cabinet rank is not available to answer questions in this House. Many consider that to be a complete insult to the democratic process.
	Small shops need rate relief and credit lines, but there is an enormous gap between the Government's words about banks being prepared to lend to small businesses and the reality on the ground. Even now, banks are cancelling overdraft facilities left, right and centre, often at just two days' notice. Does the Minister accept that that is already driving many businesses to the wall?

Ian Pearson: I am certainly very aware that there is anecdotal evidence of the practices that the hon. Gentleman describes. It is one of the reasons why the Chancellor and my noble Friend Lord Mandelson are meeting the banks today. It is clearly right at this time that banks should continue to make lending available to small businesses. One of the conditions of the bank recapitalisation fund that we announced two weeks ago is that banks must continue to make competitively priced loans available to small businesses. We are discussing that with the banks and will continue to do so, because we want to make sure that small businesses are helped through this difficult time. We do not want the banks to turn off the tap and cause good businesses to face huge financial problems.

Alan Duncan: The Government say that there should be more lending, but they then add—understandably, I suppose—that financial conditions will have to be met. In a recession, are not those conditions bound to stop the lending that is promised? Whatever propaganda we get from the Government about what they want to happen, there will in fact be a further serious contraction in lending by banks to business, and not much of the promised expansion in lending.

Ian Pearson: It is not the role of Government to make decisions on lending between individual banks and companies, and it is right and proper that that business be conducted in the normal way. However, the Government can talk to the banks about the principles that underpin their lending—the instructions that go from head office to branches and the managers who make decisions with companies on a day-to-day basis. It is right that the Government should show a strong interest in that, and right that when talking to banks about the bank recapitalisation package, we insist that they do all that they can to support small businesses and home owners with mortgages in these difficult economic times, and we are committed to doing just that. The hon. Gentleman should welcome that, not criticise it.

Grocery Sector Ombudsman

Andrew George: What recent assessment he has made of the progress made by the Competition Commission in establishing a grocery sector ombudsman.

Gareth Thomas: The Competition Commission is undertaking an informal consultation on how to establish an ombudsman and is arranging a series of meetings with interested parties. Subject to responses, the commission plans to publish shortly, for wider consultation, a final order on the groceries supply code of practice and undertakings in relation to the ombudsman.

Andrew George: I am sure that the Minister will congratulate the Competition Commission on a thorough, balanced report, which draws conclusions and makes recommendations. Crucially, the commission found that
	"the transfer of unexpected costs and excessive risk"
	by supermarkets would impede investment and innovation, and would ultimately affect consumer interests, too. In what circumstances would the Government contradict the commission's carefully considered conclusions and recommendations, particularly with regard to the establishment of the ombudsman?

Gareth Thomas: The hon. Gentleman will forgive me for pointing out to him that the Competition Commission published its report at the end of April. I acknowledge that it did a thorough piece of work. I hope that he acknowledges that the Government, who published their response to that document some three months later, after we had had the chance to talk to a number of interested parties about the commission's recommendations, also did a thorough job of work in thinking about how to respond to the commission. I hope that he will forgive us if, rather than speculate on what might happen and what might be in the order that the commission publishes, we wait to see what happens in the forthcoming consultation. We will allow the commission to do its work, and we will review our position at the end of the process.

Topical Questions

Philip Davies: If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.

Patrick McFadden: Our Secretary of State has the Department firmly focused on working with business in this difficult economic period and on making sure that business comes out the other side of this period with the entrepreneurial strength and creativity for which British business is renowned across the world.

Philip Davies: The best thing that the Government could do to help small businesses is get off their backs. If the Government do not do something to ease the taxation, regulatory and employment cost burdens on small businesses, many thousands of them will go to the wall and many thousands of people will lose their jobs. May I therefore suggest that one of the first things he should look to do is exempt small businesses from huge swathes of regulation that some bigger businesses might be able to afford, but many small businesses certainly cannot?

Patrick McFadden: I agree that regulation can be a cost to businesses. We need some regulation because we operate in a society and a labour market with rules, but the Government make a significant effort to reduce administrative burdens. We have identified some £800 million of administrative burdens to be cut—for example, many small businesses no longer have to appoint a company secretary or have an annual general meeting, which saves costs, and we have made a number of other changes. The general point that the hon. Gentleman raises about regulation is fair, and the matter is one that the Government take seriously. We make a significant effort across Government to make sure that regulatory burdens are no greater than they need to be.

Eric Illsley: On the need to look at regulation across Government, in a time of great economic uncertainty, the glass industry has begun to suffer. It is a multinational industry, but Ardagh Glass has already closed a furnace in Worksop, and United Glass is closing a plant in Harlow. All those factories are affected by climate change legislation, including the integrated pollution prevention and control directive and the climate change levy, which has been increased even before its first term has run out. They are also affected by huge gas prices and by the emissions trading regulations. All those pieces of legislation or regulatory burdens are dealt with by other Departments—either the Department of Energy and Climate Change or the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs—but will my hon. Friend get together with colleagues across Government, as he has mentioned, to consider how to relieve that environmental taxation burden on industries such as the glass industry?

Ian Pearson: I know that the glass industry is important in my hon. Friend's constituency. Overall, it is worth about £1.2 billion annually and provides about 28,000 jobs. He is right that climate change agreements and the EU emissions trading scheme cover the glass sector. We are obviously not going to reduce our commitment to climate change agreements, which are beneficial, or to the EU emissions trading scheme, which we strongly support, but he is right to point out the burden of some regulations, and I am certainly happy to meet him and talk to colleagues in the new Department for Energy and Climate Change about those issues.

Adam Holloway: Is the £350 million that has been announced to help to train staff in small and medium-sized enterprises new money or warmed-up old money?

Ian Pearson: It is money that is part of the budget of the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills to the period 2010-11. We decided to give priority to small businesses, which I would have thought all parties in the House would welcome. We have also announced that we will remove some restrictions on how that money is spent. We have refocused measures, so that there will be less regulation on how the money is spent and so that it can be used to help to provide bite-sized chunks of training for companies. Companies that face having to go on to short-time working can take the opportunity to retrain staff, rather than lay them off. That is a sensible thing to do during difficult economic times, and it will be welcomed by business.

Andrew Robathan: Since the Department is responsible for regional development agencies, will a Minister—any Minister—tell the House what exactly regional Ministers do? What is the point of them, apart from their acting as regional cheerleaders for the Labour party?

Patrick McFadden: Regional Ministers play an important role in working with businesses in their local area in difficult economic times, as do RDAs. The other night, we debated in the House measures to help small businesses. RDAs are an important part of that work, because they can always move more quickly on information on the ground in local areas, and respond in a timely and appropriate matter.

Jim Devine: As my hon. Friends are aware, it is just over two years since the collapse of Farepak and people are still looking for answers to what happened to their money. Two weeks ago in business questions, I asked about the report commissioned by the Government, and I was given an assurance by my right hon. and learned Friend the Leader of the House, who said:
	"The fact that they are still waiting for the report is not acceptable. I thank him for raising the issue...We really do need to get the matter sorted out. I will work with the Deputy Leader of the House to make sure that we get some answers fast."—[ Official Report, 9 October 2008; Vol. 480, c. 419.]
	When are those people going to get answers?

Gareth Thomas: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his question. I know that he and a number of other Members have continued to pursue the matter extremely closely. He will be aware that the companies investigation branch of the Department has been investigating what went wrong in that case and has completed its investigation. As my hon. Friend may know, legal advice is being sought to decide whether there are grounds for prosecution or disqualification.

Peter Luff: On the subject of the part-privatisation of Royal Mail, we were told a few minutes ago that Richard Hooper's report on independent mail services was due to be published soon. When the Secretary of State appeared before the Select Committee on Tuesday this week, he said that he was contemplating giving additional work to that review team. Can the Minister say what additional work is planned and what impact that will have on the publication timetable?

Patrick McFadden: The Hooper review is considering the changed context in which Royal Mail operates in terms of competition not only from other mail providers, but from other technologies. That competition has seen the volume of mail decline by 2 or 3 per cent. a year in recent years in this country and in others. The Hooper review must take all these changes into account in compiling its report, and that is exactly what the review team is doing.

Henry Bellingham: Further to the Minister's statement yesterday on small businesses, does he agree that a consensus is emerging that the public sector could make a real difference to small and medium-sized enterprises if the entire public sector paid its invoices on time? Will the Minister confirm that central Government, local government, quangos and agencies will all pay SMEs' invoices within 10 days?

Ian Pearson: The Government's commitment to make payments within 10 days is an important one and we already monitor that through Department annual plans. The majority of Government payments are made within 10 days, but we want to do better. The regional development agencies, which each spend £750 million a year, have also committed to pay within 10 days. We are spending public money, and in matters of the public purse we need to ensure that we do so in a proper way. We must make sure that invoices are correct and that goods and services of the right quality have been delivered. Once those assurances have been provided, we need to get cracking and ensure that we pay promptly. That is important for small businesses facing cash flow problems. We are doing all we can to deliver that through the Government system.

Alun Michael: I am sure my hon. Friend agrees that the creation of the Internet Governance Forum with a five-year mandate from the United Nations was a British diplomatic triumph, and that the creation of the UK Internet Governance Forum is a good example of co-operation between Government, industry and Parliament. Does my hon. Friend agree that the best way to promote international co-operation in the long term is to use the UK IGF to make the UK the safest place in the world to do business online?

Ian Pearson: I agree with my right hon. Friend, who makes some important points. I pay tribute to him for the work that he has done on the matter over many years. We are committed to ensuring the success of the multi-stakeholder Internet Governance Forum. It is largely due to his actions that the UK has taken such a leadership role in this area, and we will endeavour to continue to do that in the future. I am happy to work with him. As he knows, our noble Friend Lord Carter will meet him shortly to discuss these issues.

Andrew Rosindell: The Minister will know that my constituency, Romford, has a wide variety of small and independent local businesses that serve our community, one of which is the Havering Christian bookshop. Many such organisations are struggling to survive in the present economic climate. What will the Government do to nurture and protect small businesses such as that?

Gareth Thomas: In addition to the series of measures mentioned by my fellow Ministers, the hon. Gentleman may wish to check that the small business he mentions has sought to claim small business rate relief, a measure that is helping to reduce the administrative burdens on small businesses. It was opposed by his party but we have introduced it none the less, and it makes a real difference. If the business does not know how to claim, it should check the local council's website, where the form should be shown.

PUBLIC ACCOUNTS COMMISSION

The Chairman of the Public Accounts Commission was asked—

NAO Corporate Plan

Philip Hollobone: What the procedure is for the Public Accounts Commission's consideration of the National Audit Office's corporate plan.

Alan Williams: The National Audit Office normally prepares a corporate plan in July each year. The Public Accounts Commission then questions the Comptroller and Auditor General, and if it is content, it approves the plan.

Philip Hollobone: What support is the National Audit Office providing to Select Committees of the House, and does it have any plans to extend it?

Alan Williams: The National Audit Office has plans to extend the support it gives, but that work is growing rapidly anyway. The NAO provides support within its areas of expertise, such as analysis of financial statements, value for money, performance evaluation and financial management and reporting. In addition, it provides staff on short-term secondments to Select Committees and to the Committee Office scrutiny unit. As I have said, the support has been increasing. In 2007-08, the NAO assisted 17 parliamentary Select Committees in addition to the Public Accounts Committee.

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: The right hon. Gentleman will know that one of the new roles that the Government have given the National Audit Office is to audit the figures in the Red Book following the pre-Budget statement. An increasing task in that Red Book work will be on the alarming increase in debt, which has to be repaid and serviced. Can he give the House an assurance that there will be sufficient resources in the National Audit Office's corporate plan to deal with that increasing task?

Alan Williams: At the moment, the corporate plan has an increase of 3 per cent. a year for the next three years. I have received no representations for any extra resources as yet. Obviously, if there were a request, we would consider it.

CHURCH COMMISSIONERS

The hon. Member for Middlesbrough, representing the Church Commissioners, was asked—

Financial Stability

David Taylor: What recent assessment the Church Commissioners have made of the impact of recent economic events on the financial stability of the Church of England.

Stuart Bell: If I might differ slightly from the Church of England by way of assessment, I should say that the Church Commissioners manage their investments proactively and are able to move swiftly when economic circumstances change. Even before the credit crunch began, they sensed that times were changing and acted accordingly. Between 2005 and early 2007, they sold more than £400 million of residential property at prices near the top of the market, and they made £250 million from commercial property sales during the same period. However, in the Church of England we must not overlook the role of individual churchgoers in funding the Church's vital contribution to the spiritual life of this country.

David Taylor: The Archbishops of Canterbury and York were enthusiastically applauded by the public for their recent broadsides against the financial yobs in the City, yet the Church Commissioners' investment practices, including sales of mortgage portfolios and depositing many millions of pounds in hedge funds, seem to undermine the authority of the archbishops' acerbic articles. What discussions has the Church's ethical investment advisory group had to ensure that that sort of investment is proscribed, not least because it risks the spiritual as well as the financial stability of our Church?

Stuart Bell: The statements of the archbishops added a moral dimension to the current global financial crisis. The commissioners are in regular touch with the ethical investment advisory group, and are in contact with it again in the light of the archbishops' comments. I assure my hon. Friend that we are committed to our ethical investment policy, which is of long standing, and that all the commissioners' investment decisions are informed by the work of the ethical investment advisory group.

Peter Luff: Can the hon. Gentleman assure me that the financial pressures facing the Church Commissioners will not lead them to any precipitate action in relation to Hartlebury castle, the historic home of the Bishops of Worcester? He will know that discussions are taking place in Worcestershire to ensure that public access to the castle remains and to ensure the continuity of the Hurd library in its historic location. I hope that the Church Commissioners will continue those very constructive discussions.

Stuart Bell: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who has taken a strong interest in the castle, as have we, over a period of time. He is aware that my door is always open to any representations that he might wish to make.
	To return to the broader question asked by my hon. Friend the Member for North-West Leicestershire (David Taylor) about the financial stability of the Church, we invest for the long term and distribute the returns with a view to the long term, thereby aiming to maintain the value of the funds in real terms over time. In other words, we do not allow our support for today's beneficiaries to disadvantage tomorrow's beneficiaries.

Andy Reed: Further to the answer that my hon. Friend gave earlier, will he assure us that during these difficult times the ethical dimension of funding and investment will not be lost? There is always great pressure at such times to get the greatest returns, but if archbishops are going to talk about moral imperatives, the Church of England and the commissioners must daily live those out in their investment decisions.

Stuart Bell: I can give my hon. Friend that assurance. I refer again to the ethical investment advisory group, but we should not overlook the role that local churches play. They depend on individuals giving, and that is true for the Church of England. As for the Church Commissioners, we will continue to work closely with the ethical investment advisory group.

PUBLIC ACCOUNTS COMMISSION

The Chairman of the Public Accounts Commission was asked—

NAO Overseas Investments

Peter Bone: Whether the National Audit Office has funds invested in overseas banks.

Alan Williams: The NAO does not have funds invested in overseas banks.

Peter Bone: I am grateful for that answer. However, does the right hon. Gentleman not think it strange that the commission responsible for overseeing local government, the Audit Commission, had £10 million invested in Icelandic banks?

Alan Williams: That is—thankfully—outside my remit, but I point out that, as the Audit Commission is audited externally by the NAO, it is a matter for the Public Accounts Committee.

CHURCH COMMISSIONERS

The hon. Member for Middlesbrough, representing the Church Commissioners, was asked—

Lottery Grants

Michael Fabricant: If the Church Commissioners will provide guidance to churches and cathedrals on applications for lottery grants for the upkeep of church buildings and the provision of visitor facilities.

Stuart Bell: I advise the hon. Gentleman that the Church already provides such advice via its "Church Care" and "Parish Resources" websites. In addition, the lottery providers give specific advice on their own schemes via their websites. I applaud the cathedrals that do so much to welcome tourists. They see that work as part of their ministry, and we should recognise the boost that they give to the wider economy through tourist income. Cathedrals such as Lichfield's are a major draw.

Michael Fabricant: May I put it to the hon. Gentleman that the commissioners need to be a little more proactive than he describes? Lichfield cathedral recently applied for many millions of pounds for the Inspire project to improve the fabric and visitor facilities, but it was refused. Such applications to the Heritage Lottery Fund cost thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of pounds. Do not the commissioners need to give much better advice on what sort of lottery applications are likely to be successful?

Stuart Bell: I am aware that Lichfield cathedral applied to the Heritage Lottery Fund for funding for a scheme to improve visitor and interpretation facilities. I congratulate the cathedral and the hon. Gentleman on their sterling efforts to engage with visitors. My colleagues at Church house supported the cathedral's application, but unfortunately the Heritage Lottery Fund could not fund all the applications that were before it; it held a ballot in which Lichfield cathedral was unsuccessful. I hope that the cathedral will find an alternative funding source, but I will take his comments back to the Church Commissioners.

Patrick Cormack: As one who was associated with the appeal for our diocesan cathedral in Lichfield, may I ask the hon. Gentleman to examine this with a little more care and in greater detail? The diversion of lottery resources to the Olympics has caused enormous distortion and created a very great problem for all our cathedrals. It is shameful to think that there has to be the sort of ballot to which he refers. Will he do his best to influence the powers that be?

Stuart Bell: I raised that question with the Heritage Lottery Fund after the subject was brought up on the Floor of the House, and it told me that lottery funding for the Church would not be affected by the Olympic games. We should welcome the help that the Heritage Lottery Fund gives us with the challenge of keeping cathedrals and churches in a good state of repair. We all acknowledge the need for continuing Government support and the constant pressure that this House exerts through questions such as those put by the hon. Gentlemen, which are always welcome.

ELECTORAL COMMISSION COMMITTEE

The hon. Member for Gosport, representing the Speaker's Committee on the Electoral Commission, was asked—

Party Funding

Andrew Rosindell: How many investigations the Electoral Commission has carried out into political party funding in the last 12 months.

Peter Viggers: The Electoral Commission informs me that it has carried out formal investigations into three cases relating to political party funding in the past 12 months.

Andrew Rosindell: My hon. Friend will know that the Government intend to rush through new rules on what is known as "triggering" before the Electoral Commission has issued its guidance on the matter. Does he agree that that is a recipe for confusion, which will fatally undermine the confidence in any new rules?

Peter Viggers: My hon. Friend is on to an important point. If the House passes the measure in the Political Parties and Elections Bill that introduces a new triggering mechanism, the Electoral Commission will consult as soon as possible after the parliamentary process and before Royal Assent. It will then issue its guidelines on the new triggering mechanism as soon as it can. Of course, the guidelines will not be definitive because the law on the triggering mechanism will stand to be decided by the courts, and because the matter falls under the Representation of the People Acts, it will be for the police, not the commission, to decide whether or not to prosecute.

David Winnick: Will the hon. Gentleman confirm that it is illegal either to receive or to solicit in any way foreign donations for political parties? In view of the allegations made about the shadow Chancellor, would it not be appropriate for the Electoral Commission to investigate accordingly?

Mr. Speaker: Order. The shadow Chancellor is not in the Chamber. Did the hon. Gentleman approach the shadow Chancellor to say that he was going to ask this question?

David Winnick: Of course not.

Mr. Speaker: Well, he should have. The hon. Gentleman knows the courtesies of the House—he has been here long enough. I instruct the hon. Member for Gosport (Sir Peter Viggers) not to answer.

Jonathan Djanogly: During Second Reading of the Bill on Monday, it was noted that the Electoral Commission remains opposed to the provisions dealing with new political donor notification. Does that remain the case?

Peter Viggers: Mr. Speaker, you will know that the Speaker's Committee on the Electoral Commission does not get involved in individual cases, but the commission has made a statement that no facts have been reported to it that would cause it to make any inquiry.

Business of the House

Theresa May: Will the Deputy Leader of the House give us the business for next week?

Chris Bryant: The business for next week will be as follows:
	Monday 27 October—Remaining stages of the Local Transport Bill [ Lords].
	Tuesday 28 October—Remaining stages of the Climate Change Bill [ Lords]. Followed by a motion to establish a Select Committee of the House.
	Wednesday 29 October—Opposition Day [11th Allotted Day] (Second Part). There will be a debate on an Opposition motion entitled Olympic legacy, after which the Chairman of Ways and Means has named opposed private business for consideration.
	Thursday 30 October—Topical debate: subject to be announced, followed by a general debate on defence policy.
	The provisional business for the week commencing 3 November will include:
	Monday 3 November—Remaining stages of the Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Bill [ Lords].
	Tuesday 4 November—Remaining stages of the Employment Bill [ Lords].
	Wednesday 5 November—General debate: subject to be announced.
	Thursday 6 November—Topical debate: subject to be announced, followed by general debate on public engagement on fighting crime.
	I should also like to inform the House that the business in Westminster Hall for 6 November will be:
	Thursday 6 November—A debate on the report from the Communities and Local Government Committee on the supply of rented housing.
	I am sure all Members would like to wish the Leader of the House a healthy recovery as she has been struck down by the lurgy.

Theresa May: I assure the Deputy Leader of the House that Conservative Members send their best wishes to the Leader of the House and hope that she makes a speedy recovery.
	The Home Office announced today that several police forces have been under-reporting the figures for violent crime. The Home Secretary has been trawling through the TV studios, but may we have an urgent statement from her in the House about that serious matter so that hon. Members can question her on it?
	Yesterday, the Government deliberately restricted the time available for debate on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, contrary to assurances that the Leader of the House gave last week. That meant that dozens of new clauses and amendments were not debated. Not only did the Government schedule a statement, which could easily have been made 24 hours earlier, but they ignored the conventions of the House to ensure that the clauses on abortion were not debated. May we have an assurance from the Leader of the House that she recognises her responsibilities to the whole House and that, in future, she will ensure that the timetabling of debates is dictated by the interests of the House rather than by the Government's convenience?
	On Monday, we will debate the remaining the stages of the Local Transport Bill. At this late stage, the Government have tabled 162 amendments and 11 new clauses, and effectively rewritten part of the Bill. Yet again, the Government will railroad a Bill through without proper scrutiny. May we have more time for Report stage of that measure? More generally, when will the Government implement the Modernisation Committee's call for more time for debate on Report?
	In the past three weeks, the House has debated the Government's fiscal rules, unemployment and small business—all on Conservative motions in Opposition time. Given that tomorrow's GDP figures are expected to show negative growth, that the Governor of the Bank of England has said that the UK now seems likely to be entering a recession, and that even the Prime Minister has allowed the R-word to pass his lips, when will we have a full debate in Government time on the state of the economy?
	There is a report today that the Office of Rail Regulation has ordered Network Rail to correct a design flaw in thousands of points on our rail network. Network Rail has challenged that, but may we have an urgent statement from the Secretary of State for Transport so that concerned Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere (Mr. Clappison), in whose constituency the Potters Bar crash occurred, can question the Government on that serious matter?
	May we have a debate on Government communications? On 15 October, the Government announced £100 million to help unemployed people retrain. That was not new money—it had already been announced. On Tuesday, the Government announced £350 million for small businesses. That was not new money—it had already been announced. On 13 October, the Government announced that bank lending would return to 2007 levels, but we now know that that was not a commitment but an aspiration. When people are facing the loss of their jobs and their homes, and small businesses face going under because they cannot get bank loans, what sort of a Government give people false promises of hope? They are a Government who believe more in political convenience than proper scrutiny, who are more interested in spin than effective action and who have taken this country from boom to bust.

Chris Bryant: Well, it is very nice, as usual, to hear from the right hon. Lady as she comes out with some of her usual lines, especially the last bit. She talks about the Government re-announcing things, but I think that I have heard her peroration perhaps 25 times in the past year. It is good that she is on her usual form.
	First, the right hon. Lady mentioned crime statistics, but she failed to say that the latest crime statistics show that crime again has fallen by 6 per cent. That means that crime has fallen by 39 per cent. since 1997.  [Interruption.]

Mr. Speaker: Order.

Chris Bryant: The right hon. Lady is mouthing things at me, and she is right to point out that there is a significant issue about how we tackle violent crime. Crimes of violence against the person are also down by 7 per cent., but we all know, in each of our constituencies, of our constituents' genuine concern about violent crime. There is an issue in that some police authorities this year have chosen, following advice, to report some violent crimes in a slightly different way. However, it is important to acknowledge that all the statistics for homicide and burglary are down.
	The right hon. Lady's second point was about the Human Embryology and Fertilisation Bill. The Government are glad that the Bill passed its Third Reading yesterday with a very significant majority of more than two thirds—355 to 129 votes. There were many free votes yesterday and I think that the House reached its settled mind on the Bill, which I believe will make a significant difference, ensuring that in future scientific innovation can make a difference to people's lives.
	On the Local Transport Bill, the right hon. Lady referred to the large number of amendments tabled for next week's debate. As she knows full well, many of the Government amendments are often technical and many are a response to Committee debates. One much misunderstood aspect of the political process—it is never reported by the media—is the importance of the Committee stage in improving our legislative work.
	The right hon. Lady made various statements about the economy. I make no bones about the fact that we are facing difficult times, which is why we need to be absolutely focused on the needs of home owners, on jobs and on ensuring that if people are going to lose their jobs, they have the skills necessary to find a new one and additional support for paying their mortgage. We have provided the ability to debate these issues in various ways—through regular statements, for example—and when I speak to the Leader of the House later, I will ensure that she understands the House's requirement to be kept up to date throughout the process.
	On Network Rail and last year's crash, which very unfortunately led to the death of an elderly lady, we of course send our sympathies to those involved. We want to make sure that any lessons that can possibly be learned will be learned. The right hon. Lady could bring the matter up at Transport questions. If a statement needs to be made, I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Transport will want to come to the House.
	Finally, the right hon. Lady spoke about Government communications. I make absolutely no apology for Government communications over the last few weeks, because we have made it absolutely clear that we will stand by ordinary families as they face the difficult international situation that we all face. I know that sometimes the right hon. Lady would like to pretend that this is just some home-grown situation and that we in little Britain can simply manufacture our own way out it. The truth is that the issues we need to address are international and some of the solutions are international—

Mr. Speaker: Order. It is not the international issues, but those of next week, that we should be addressing.

Chris Bryant: I am very grateful, Mr. Speaker.

Gerald Kaufman: May I congratulate my hon. Friend on his first appearance at the Dispatch Box and on the combative way in which he disposed of the stream of consciousness that we always receive from those on the Opposition Front Bench?
	I refer my hon. Friend to early-day motion 2327.
	 [That this House declares Richard Kay, 287 Middleton Road, Crumpsall, Manchester M8 4LY, to be unfit to be a property owner, since on 30th June 2007 he bought 64 Sandown Street, Manchester M18 8SA from Places for People with a covenant put into the contract of sale that the property be brought back into occupation within nine months of being sold but has flouted that covenant, leaving 64 Sandown Lane virtually derelict, not only making the area unsightly but causing considerable expense to a neighbour; and calls on Manchester City Council to take immediate action against this irresponsible person to require him to conform to the covenant without further delay or face condign consequences.]
	It is headed "Richard Kay, Manchester property owner", referring to a man who, in breach of legal agreements and commitments, is turning an area of my constituency into a slum. Will my hon. Friend refer it to our right hon. Friend the Minister for Housing so that she may assist Manchester city council to get this slum provoker dealt with in the most condign way?

Chris Bryant: I am very grateful to my right hon. Friend for his kind comments. He was a fine Chairman of the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport—indeed, he can probably never be bettered in that capacity.
	On the issue that my right hon. Friend raises, I know from my constituency that unscrupulous landlords can create slums in a way that we would have hoped had been abolished in the 1920s, let alone today. I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Minister for Housing will want to take up the issues precisely as my right hon. Friend outlined them.

Simon Hughes: I, too, welcome the Deputy Leader of the House to his stand-in role, and ask him to pass our best wishes to the Leader of the House for a speedy recovery.
	May I join in the strongest protests that have been made about yesterday's business? Every objective listener to last week's business questions would have taken what the Leader of the House of the House said then to mean that the business would follow its normal course: that new clauses would be taken first and amendments next. It was not until this week that the Government tabled a programme motion to change the normal procedure. It is not acceptable for that to be done in any circumstances, but it is even less acceptable given that we were led to believe, literally a week earlier, that it would not be done.
	We have been given plenty of reassurances that the Government will consider how we deal with Report stages. Four Government Bills are to be dealt with in the next two weeks, and amendments and new clauses are likely to be tabled. Can the Deputy Leader of the House assure us that there will be time for Opposition Members and Labour Back Benchers to debate those amendments and new clauses, and for a proper Third Reading debate to take place? If he cannot, he and the Leader of the House are not doing their job properly in regard to the most serious parliamentary matter.
	May I link that with a question about the timetable for next year's sittings, which was announced last week in a written statement by the Leader of the House? It was announced that the House would sit for 128 days, fewer by far than in any other non-election year since at least 1979.

Andrew Robathan: That was an election year.

Simon Hughes: Yes, it was an election year. No Government have announced such a small number of sitting days for nearly 30 years.
	When people are going to lose their jobs, for us to give ourselves holidays—an extended Christmas and new year holiday, for instance—[Hon. Members: "It is not a holiday."] It is a break from this place. For the House of Commons not to come back to work between July and October gives it the most adverse reputation out there.
	The Deputy Leader of the House and his colleagues have indicated that they are interested in constitutional reform. Will the Deputy Leader now say whether the Government are serious about handing over control of the business of the House from the Government to Parliament? If he does not tell us that, I will table a motion for us to debate, proposing that Parliament should be in charge of Parliament's business, not the Government, who are clearly rigging it to their own party political advantage.
	We heard today of the continuing difficulties of establishing a political settlement in Zimbabwe. May we have an early debate about whether asylum seekers from Zimbabwe who cannot go home should be allowed to work in this country while they wait for their cases to be decided? I gather that there are Ministers who share that view, and it is the logical view. I ask for us to be able to debate the matter, so that those poor people who cannot go back to their own country, who want to work here, pay taxes and contribute, and with whom Britain has the strongest links, can have an opportunity to participate in this country while their future is determined.
	Finally, yesterday we received a major lobby on pensions. May we have a debate on the state pension before the uprating statement, so that we can quiz the Government on whether the level of the pension will be what pensioners need and demand, and whether it can be what pensioners who have worked believe, honestly, that they deserve?

Chris Bryant: It is good to see the hon. Gentleman in his place. I am sure that the real reason why he wants that debate on pensions is that he will be able to bring along the leader of his party, the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Clegg), so that the right hon. Gentleman can understand precisely how much the state pension is. It is not £30 a week.
	The hon. Gentleman made an interesting and important point about Zimbabwe. I will pass his comments to the relevant Ministers, and will also take what he said as a suggestion for a possible topical debate.
	As for whether the business of the House should be run by Parliament or Government, the fact is that, last year, 59 of the 155 days on which Parliament sat were determined not by the Government but by the official Opposition, the smaller parties or Back Benchers. I will only add that it is not right to compare this House, and our constitutional settlement, with arrangements in other countries. In our case, the Government are the Government only because they have a majority in the House. I therefore think that the hon. Gentleman makes a constitutional faux pas.
	On next year's sittings, the dates of the party conferences are an issue, as that has made it difficult for us to start earlier in October than we did this year. There is also an issue in that next year's Session will finish earlier than this year's; this year it will finish late in November and the state opening of Parliament and the Queen's Speech is not until December, but next year they will be considerably earlier. It is therefore wrong to compare too precisely next year's dates with this year's. I should also add that although the hon. Gentleman says that we are on holiday when we are in recess, that is certainly not my experience. Since I was elected to the House in 2001, my experience of parliamentary life is that I work just as hard during the recess as I do when I am sitting here, and I find that my constituents expect me to do so because the job of the constituency MP has completely changed over the last 20 years.
	On yesterday's events, there was a programme motion before the House, which it voted for, so we decided to go forward with the business, and we had a series of votes. In the end, the main issue is that it is absolutely right and proper that we should have an appropriate amount of time to scrutinise all proposed legislation that passes through this House. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill was debated in total, on the Floor of both Houses, for 86 hours, with 10 sessions in the Lords and, so far, eight sessions in the Commons. I think that that is an adequate amount of time for us to be able to do our work, not least because there was also substantial pre-legislative scrutiny.

Jim Sheridan: Will my hon. Friend allow the House time to explore the welcome news, announced by the Prime Minister yesterday, about helping people facing the repossession of their home? I understand, however, that these welcome measures do not apply to Scotland, and given that the whole country is experiencing difficulties during this economic downturn, can my hon. Friend say what support, if any, this House could give to the Scottish people, or, indeed, what the Scottish Parliament could do to help them?

Chris Bryant: My hon. Friend is absolutely right: we must make sure that repossession is the last possible outcome when people are having difficulties in paying their mortgage. That is why the Master of the Rolls yesterday approved the Civil Justice Council's new protocol, which will make sure that every other avenue is pursued first. It would be extraordinary if the same were not to apply in Scotland, and I urge the Scottish Executive to ensure that home owners get that protection in Scotland. That is what is already making a difference in Britain, as opposed to the United States of America.

Andrew Rosindell: As the Deputy Leader of the House will be aware, it is now established that the people of the British overseas territories have the right to self-determination, as is the case for Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands. Will he ask the Foreign Secretary to make a statement on the House on the Lords' decision regarding the British Indian Ocean Territory and the appalling fate of the people of the Chagos islands, who were forcibly removed from their homes in the 1960s by a Labour Government, and who are now, against their wishes, living in a foreign land? Will the Deputy Leader of the House make a statement to the House and arrange for a debate to take place, so that justice can be done to those British people who have been so appallingly treated?

Chris Bryant: The hon. Gentleman will know that the House of Lords has already found in the Government's favour on this issue, but that is not to say that we do not want to do everything we can to support those people. I know the hon. Gentleman has led—admirably, although I often disagree with him—many debates on overseas territories in Westminster Hall, and I would have thought this was a suitable subject for debate there.

Kate Hoey: Will the Deputy Leader of the House arrange for an urgent debate on why it is taking so long to renew the Post Office card account? People are very worried about this issue. The Deputy Leader of the House is a great supporter of the European Union, and he well knows that if this were happening in France, Germany or any other European country, the decision would have been made ages ago, despite all the rigmarole. It is time that the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions came here to explain again why this is taking so long.

Chris Bryant: The Secretary of State was here earlier this week and answered many questions.  [Interruption.] Well, I read what he said, and he said that he hated to sound like a broken record, but the truth is that a commercial tender is currently going on, and it would be wrong of me or him to affect that process. I do, however, know from my own constituency that post offices are essential to many communities, and I am sure that that will be borne in mind in this process.

Nicholas Soames: Will the hon. Gentleman convey to the Leader of the House that the Prime Minister is negligent in his duties to this House in respect of not coming here on a regular basis to make a statement about the war in Afghanistan? British troops are engaged every day in situations of great danger. There is a constantly shifting strategic scene. General Petraeus has recently been here to discuss these matters with the Prime Minister, and NATO members are at odds with each other. This is a very dangerous situation and the Prime Minister should come before this House regularly—as all former Prime Ministers have done when Britain has been at war—to account for the actions of the Government in the administration of the war.

Chris Bryant: The hon. Gentleman, who is a former Defence Minister, speaks wisely in that it is important that the House receives regular updates on what is happening, because we all know from our constituencies that people are in some cases laying down their lives on an entirely honourable basis in Afghanistan, to protect the people of Afghanistan, to bring peace there and to protect security in the world. There will be a debate on defence next Thursday afternoon, and I am sure the hon. Gentleman will want to take part in it. I should just say, however, that this Prime Minister has appeared very regularly in the House and made statements on a wide range of issues, and I know that he takes very seriously his responsibility of making sure that the House is updated on these important issues.

Gisela Stuart: The House takes identity fraud and its prevention very seriously, and we have passed legislation on it, but may we have a debate to look at whether some of the relevant agencies are properly implementing the measures we have provided, because if the experience of a constituent of mine is anything to go by, it would appear that it is possible to go to post office depots and ask for post to be delayed without the proper identification requirements? That gives fraudsters a window of two or three weeks in which they can use an identity before its use is even discovered by the people affected.

Chris Bryant: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that. It is clearly a significant issue, and I have never spotted it before. I will raise it with the Department for Work and Pensions, and I will take it as a suggestion for a topical debate. Ensuring that people's identities are not stolen is an issue we have to deal with now, and it is one that we would never have thought of 20 years ago.

David Heath: I think the House will agree that it is as important that we show as great an interest in small businesses as in the situation of the people in the City. Notwithstanding yesterday's statement on this matter, may we therefore have a debate in Government time on small businesses, in order to answer some of the questions about which Ministers only waffle, such as how we can provide proper access to the small firms loan guarantee scheme, how we can avoid the arbitrary call-in of overdraft facilities by banks and how we can create flexibility on the part of Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, and discuss the malign effects of the empty property tax?

Chris Bryant: The hon. Gentleman raises important issues, which, as he admits, have already been raised this week. The Government are very keen to make sure that the House is updated in what is a fast-moving environment in terms of the general economy. The most important thing we have done for small and medium-sized enterprises is recapitalise the banks, and I think the eyes of all Members of the House, and all taxpayers in the country, will be on the banks, making sure that they are not paying themselves bonuses and then failing to make loans available to small enterprises. If the money is not circulating to the SMEs, the heart may be beating but the blood will not be circulating around our economy.

David Kidney: Will the Government prepare the ground for the next time that the House considers our 40-year-old abortion law, by commissioning an independent study into the operation of the law to date?

Chris Bryant: Obviously, that is a matter for the Secretary of State for Health, and I will pass on that suggestion to him. However, it also falls within the remit of the Health Committee, and if it were to choose to conduct a further report on the issue of abortion—how it operates, and how people have access to termination services—that would be within its power.

John Bercow: May we please have a debate in Government time next week, on the Floor of the House, on the proposed changes to the special educational needs and disability tribunal procedure, regulations concerning which were laid before the House by the Ministry of Justice on 15 October? On 16 October, my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition tabled early-day motion 2273.
	 [That an humble Address be presented to Her Majesty, praying that the Tribunal Procedure (First-tier Tribunal) (Health, Education and Social Care Chamber) Rules 2008 (S.I., 2008, No. 2699), dated 9th October 2008, a copy of which was laid before this House on 15th October, be annulled.]
	The motion requested that those regulations be annulled because of genuine and widespread concerns that they advantage local authorities against the interest of parents. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it is important that the issue be fully aired sooner rather than later?

Chris Bryant: As sympathetic as I am to the comments of the hon. Gentleman, whom I think of as an hon. Friend— [Interruption.] Well, I think that the Leader of the House referred to him as an honorary member of the sisterhood. In all honesty I cannot offer him the assurance that he seeks about next week, because I have already declared the business of the House for that week.

Albert Owen: I welcome the Deputy Leader of the House to his stand-in role, in which he has done an excellent job. He will be aware of the importance of seaports to the economy of the British isles and of the Valuation Office Agency's re-rating of ports, which will be backdated to 2005 and will double the rate in many cases. That will have an impact not only on the owners or authorities that run the ports, but on the small businesses located in them. May we have an urgent debate on the matter? Competitiveness and small businesses will suffer as a consequence, and ask that we reconsider the decision.

Chris Bryant: I will raise those issues with the Treasury on my hon. Friend's behalf. I know that he has raised them elsewhere and been a doughty defender of small businesses in his constituency. The Government can do several things to alleviate the problems of small businesses in ports and elsewhere, notably by paying bills more swiftly, bringing forward capital projects so that small businesses have the opportunity to gain Government funding, and ensuring that there is a significant training package so that businesses are as efficient and effective as they can be in an economic environment that will be difficult for all of us.

Nicholas Winterton: Is the Deputy Leader of the House aware that he has a duty to take into account the interests of the House as a whole, not just the interests of his Government? Will he therefore take more seriously and respond to the point made by my right hon. Friend the shadow Leader of the House and the Liberal Democrat spokesman that more time should be allowed on the Floor of the House for a Bill on Report? Any programme motion that the Government table should be fully discussed with and agreed by the Opposition parties and should take account of the number of amendments that have been tabled.

Chris Bryant: I would actually prefer there to be fewer Government amendments clogging up the system. The honest truth is that by the time Bills come to this House, they should be in better nick and should not need the large number of the Government amendments that are often necessary. I know that the Leader of the House is working on trying to ensure that that is true of every new Bill that comes before us. The process of pre-legislative scrutiny that we have introduced should make that easier. In fact, the Bills that have had pre-legislative scrutiny have tended to suffer less Government amendment, although obviously they may still be subject to amendments from others.
	The hon. Gentleman makes a serious point, and I know that the Procedure Committee has been considering how we can structure debates on Report in a way that makes it possible to deal with more issues. Yes, I would have preferred it yesterday if it had been possible for us to debate more fully all the issues on which amendments were tabled. However, there had also been a request for a statement on small businesses, and it was important that we had that.

Mary Creagh: May we have a debate, perhaps in Westminster Hall, about the situation of UK nationals who have lost money in Isle of Man bank accounts? Such people include my constituent Katy Watts, who had just sold her house after spending four years as a youth worker on the Isle of Man and saw its value disappear overnight when Kaupthing Singer and Friedlander was taken into administration. Constituents of Derbyshire Members, where part of the building society was sent off to the Isle of Man, have also lost everything.

Chris Bryant: My hon. Friend raises important issues, and I am sure that she will want to do so again in the House when the relevant Ministers are here. I shall pass her comments on to Treasury Ministers, and I am sure that they will want to get back to her.

John Hemming: I congratulate the Deputy Leader of the House on the skill with which he is defending the indefensible on issues such as the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill.
	On Monday I raised the issue of oil with the Prime Minister, at columns 33 to 34 of  Hansard, and he said that we needed a constantly increasing supply. I find that rather strange, because if we are going to do something about climate change we need to reduce the consumption of oil. May we have a debate about the pressures on Ministers? The Prime Minister has clearly lost the plot, and perhaps the Deputy Leader of the House, standing in for his boss, who is standing in for her boss, would do a better job.

Chris Bryant: I confess that I have not the faintest idea what point the hon. Gentleman was trying to make towards the end. Perhaps he can elucidate it to me later.
	There is a real difficulty when considering climate change. My constituency is quite isolated from most of the labour market in south Wales, and historically people came to live in the Rhondda because there was coal there. Now there are no coal mines. A car is therefore absolutely essential for people to be able to get to work. We must balance the needs of people who need to drive their cars with the need to cut emissions.

Barry Gardiner: The Eliasch report, published last week, made clear the importance of carbon markets in a post-Kyoto settlement incorporating reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation. Will my hon. Friend consider making time for a debate about the way in which deforestation contributes 19 per cent. of all global emissions each year?

Chris Bryant: I am sure that my hon. Friend will want to raise that issue in the debate on the Climate Change Bill on Tuesday. Labour Members are proud not only that this will be the first Government in the world to ensure that an emissions reduction is written into statute, but that we are increasing the target from 60 per cent. to 80 per cent. Many of us have had constituents write to us about that.

David Taylor: I welcome the Deputy Leader of the House, and I am most relieved that his great talents have been kept well away from his preferred area of Europe.
	This week has seen the world day for osteoporosis, a disease that is causing increased bone fragility and a greater number of fractures. There are quarter of a million fractures a year in this country—one a day in each of our constituencies. May we have a debate on the condition, not least to discuss the National Osteoporosis Society's report, "Your bones and osteoporosis: What every man, woman and child should know"? It highlights the importance of diet and activity in heading off the distressing human cost, and indeed the economic cost to the NHS, of something that is largely avoidable.

Chris Bryant: I know that my hon. Friend, whom one day I will manage to persuade on Europe, has pursued this issue for some years. All of us will know from our own constituencies that many people who suffer from osteoporosis would have been able to avoid it if they had been given wiser advice in younger years. I am proud of the investment that we have made in the NHS, which has made it possible for us to open 100 brand-new hospitals. It was shameful for this country that when we came to power in 1997, 50 per cent. of the hospitals had been built before 1948.

George Young: The Deputy Leader of the House has on three occasions very elegantly sidestepped the main issue that arose from the Government's handling of yesterday's business, so may I have another shot? Can we have the assurance that my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) sought—that in future, when we reach the remaining stages of a Bill, the Government will not, in defiance of the normal conventions of the House, table a timetable motion simply to avoid debate on matters that the Government find inconvenient?

Chris Bryant: I cannot give entirely that assurance. The hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) gave the game away a bit when he said that he wanted us to take not the amendments but other things first. When a Bill is being discussed, it is important to deal with the issues on which Members have tabled amendments to clauses that are already in it. However, I know that the Procedure Committee is considering the matter, and if we need to amend the way in which we do our business, I am sure that the Leader of the House will seek to do so.

Stewart Hosie: I welcome the hon. Gentleman to his new role. A series of contracts was awarded in respect of the Scottish renewables obligation in the 1990s. The SRO output is now eligible for renewables obligation certificates, and sales have accrued £120 million, which is sitting in an Ofgem bank account. That money is accessible only by Scotland and can be spent only by the Scottish Government. However, if it were to be accessed and spent, the departmental expenditure limit rules would effectively result in a pound-for-pound clawback from existing spending. Can we have a statement from a Treasury Minister to explain the idiocy of those rules and, more importantly, to tell us when they will be changed?

Chris Bryant: If the facts are precisely as the hon. Gentleman says, the position does appear curious. However, I am cautious, because I have sometimes heard him present facts that I have subsequently investigated and found not to be quite as I would have presented them. We have Treasury questions next week, and I am sure that he will take that opportunity to raise this matter. If he wants to do so, he can, of course, apply for a Westminster Hall debate on it.

James Clappison: On rail safety, is there not a case for a statement if it is true that the Office of Rail Regulation has concluded that a design flaw in track up and down the country is exposing passengers to a risk of derailment? Is it not amazing that this is all being conducted in secret, not least given the fact that the situation is highly relevant to the Potters Bar crash, which took place six and a half years ago and in respect of which there has still not been a coroner's inquest or a public inquiry?

Chris Bryant: I am sure that the Secretary of State for Transport will be interested in what the hon. Gentleman has to say; I know that he has raised this issue on several occasions. There is no desire to keep anything secret. If there are facts that can help us to prevent other situations from occurring in future, obviously we have to learn from them. We will also ensure that the House is informed of them, so that everybody can take part in the debate.

Ian Liddell-Grainger: Can we have a debate on the Severn barrage situation? I strongly believe that the Government want the project to happen, as do local people, within reason. It is a massive civil engineering project that will take years to come to fruition. Local people are concerned, because the plans are moving and mixed signals that we are receiving from Departments are not helping local people to engage in the debate. Can we have a debate in the House to decide exactly what will happen in respect of this project, to discuss the effect of the Welsh Assembly on it and, more importantly, to ensure that local people have a say?

Chris Bryant: This could well be a subject for a topical debate, not least because I know that many Welsh MPs would like to take part in such a debate and to inform the one that has already been going on, to some degree, in the Welsh Assembly. If the Severn barrage were to go ahead, although some environmental issues and issues of relevance to people on either side of the Severn would clearly have to be debated, it is probable that significant jobs would be involved, and we would like them to go to local people.

Andrew MacKay: Does the Deputy Leader of the House accept that it is not a trivial matter when the Government announce outside Parliament that there has been a considerable under-reporting of violent crime in a number of police areas, and that that has led to a 22 per cent. increase in violent crime this year? Does he also accept that the situation confirms to members of the public, who know that crime is rising, that the Government have been hiding these facts? Should not a statement be made today, or at the very least on Monday, by the Home Secretary about this very serious issue?

Chris Bryant: The right hon. Gentleman asserts that people know that crime is rising. They know no such thing; the truth is that crime is falling. It has fallen by 6 per cent. again this year, and by 39 per cent. since 1997. Violence against the person has fallen by 7 per cent. over the past year. I do not think that he should cast aspersions around in that way. It is obviously important that announcements are made to the House, and I shall look into precisely what arrangements have been made. The Home Secretary was in the House earlier this week on two occasions.  [Interruption.] If the right hon. Gentleman will restrain himself, I would be happy to look into the matter on his behalf.

Alistair Burt: Can we have an urgent debate on the role of the media in clarifying Government policy? Such a debate would give the Home Secretary an opportunity to explain to the House why she has barred her immigration Minister from appearing on "Question Time". An appearance on that programme would have given that Minister the opportunity to clarify a contradiction between his statement in  The Times last week that
	"It's been too easy to get into this country"
	with the Home Secretary's statement in the House the following day that UK borders are
	"among the most secure in the world".—[ Official Report, 21 October 2008; Vol. 481, c. 173.]
	Surely we need that opportunity either in the House or on "Question Time".

Chris Bryant: The hon. Gentleman knows perfectly well that the immigration Minister was in this House, and answered the debate, earlier this week. I recall that it was the shadow Home Secretary who was not prepared to speak in the debate and ended up resorting to bobbing up and down like a man on the wide ocean.

Justine Greening: Will the Deputy Leader of the House follow up the progress of two internal reviews that the Department for Transport is carrying out at the moment? They relate to freedom of information requests on Heathrow airport expansion; in one case, it took seven months for a response to be given, and I am sure he will be concerned by that. I want to ensure that the internal reviews are undertaken quickly, because, as he will be aware, his Government are taking an important decision on Heathrow in the next few weeks. If I provide him with the details, will he be prepared to follow things up with the Department for Transport?

Chris Bryant: If hon. Members want to bring things to me so that I can chase them up with other Ministers, I am always prepared to do so. All the hon. Lady has to do is find me in my room around the corner.

Michael Penning: Today, the Royal British Legion celebrates the launch of its poppy appeal. Can we have a topical debate before 11 December to celebrate the work done by the Royal British Legion and the other veterans' charities, and to celebrate our veterans at this time, when we are all thinking of those who have given so much to our country?

Chris Bryant: I think that the hon. Gentleman meant 11 November, but yes, that is a very good idea for a topical debate, and I shall pursue the matter. We owe an enormous debt of gratitude; my constituency sends a lot of young men and women into the Army and the other armed forces, and we should pay tribute to them in a much more regular and sustained way in this House.

Julian Lewis: May we have a statement soon from a Health Minister on the abuse of public money by the South Central strategic health authority and Southampton City national health service primary care trust in relation to a consultation about fluoridation, which is due to affect Southampton and parts of my constituency? The strategic health authority has issued a very one-sided consultation document, and the PCT must have spent thousands of pounds of public money on producing reply postcards where first-class postage is paid. I am holding one of the postcards, which state:
	"I support fluoridation as a safe and effective method of reducing high levels of dental decay for children and adults."
	It is clear that those bodies have made up their minds and that this consultation is a sham, and a Health Minister needs to step in quickly.

Chris Bryant: I do not know whether I want to get my teeth into that issue.  [Interruption.] There needs to be one bad joke every week, does there not? The important issue is that although I cannot promise the hon. Gentleman a statement, the subject would be very suitable for either a topical debate or an Adjournment debate. Obviously, I shall ensure that his comments are taken into consideration by the Secretary of State for Health.

Mark Pritchard: May we have an urgent debate on the siting of incinerators? My constituents are reasonable people who accept that there is a role for incinerators, but does the Deputy Leader of the House agree that companies such as SITA UK need to accept the view of local people in places such as Muxton, Sheriff Hales and Priorslee in my constituency that incinerators should not be sited close to schools and residential areas?

Chris Bryant: Obviously, I do not know the details of the precise siting of the incinerator to which the hon. Gentleman refers. I know from historical issues in south Wales that the siting of incinerators can cause many families a great deal of concern and worry, and that if incinerators are placed inappropriately, they can lead to major health concerns. I think it is important that the views of local people are taken into consideration, but I cannot promise him a debate.

Angela Watkinson: May we have a debate on the impact on the housing market of home information packs? Since their introduction, at an average cost of £400, 1.5 million houses have been put on the market for sale, only 500,000 of which have been sold. That means that £400 million has been wasted on HIPs, which buyers do not want, at a time when high street estate agents are struggling to remain viable.

Chris Bryant: I know that the hon. Lady has always been opposed to the home information packs, which we debated when the legislation went through. I am not sure that now is the right time for another debate on the issue. Obviously she is free to apply for a debate in Westminster Hall, where the Minister concerned would be able to provide her with fuller information.

Peter Bone: Yesterday was a huge embarrassment for the Leader of the House. The previous week, she had promised plenty of time to discuss the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill and that there would not be a statement. That did not happen yesterday; the Leader of the House was lent on by the Prime Minister. I hope that the Leader of the House is in fact unwell and recovers soon, and that the reason she is not present is not that she is considering her position today.

Chris Bryant: The hon. Gentleman let himself down towards the end of his question. I am sure that he does not hope that the Leader of the House is ill and that he was not questioning whether what I said earlier was true. As he knows, I was here last week when the Leader of the House said that she would prefer not to have a statement yesterday—

Theresa May: Except in an emergency.

Chris Bryant: Except in an emergency, as the right hon. Lady says. There was a call for a statement in the House of Lords. I believe that it would be inappropriate for a statement to be made in the House of Lords without its being made in the House of Commons, which I believe to be the primary Chamber.

Hugh Robertson: The Deputy Leader of the House will no doubt be aware of the deeply worrying statistic that 36 pubs in this country are closing every week. Clearly that is bad news not only for those small businesses, but for the communities in which they are based. Bang on cue, the Department of Health has produced a new consultation that threatens considerably to add to the regulation on pubs and brewing companies, causing the chief executive of Shepherd Neame, a family brewer in my constituency, to write to me to say:
	"This will increase costs on responsible operators at a time when they can ill afford it and at a time when the Government is still apparently considering implementing the punitive rate of duty in the duty accelerator."
	Can we have a debate on the future of the pub industry because of the effect not only on small businesses, but on the small communities in which they are situated?

Chris Bryant: There is a complicated balancing act here. Many communities know the problems alcohol abuse, especially by young people and under-age drinkers, many of whom buy alcohol not in pubs but in off-licences. It is right that local authorities have the responsibility to make sure that there are not places where under-age people can get alcohol and that they work closely with the police to close down pubs that enable young people to do that. Yes, there are difficulties for all small businesses, including pubs, at the moment, which is why we have tried to make sure that the banks are recapitalised so that loans are available to small businesses. We have tried to make sure that every small business is —[ Interruption. ] I can hear the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) chuntering about regulation. I presume that she is now trying to say "Deregulate, deregulate, deregulate." That is what she said for 11 years until she realised that the banking industry needed a little bit of adult supervision.

Mark Lancaster: Can we have a debate on housing, and in particular on the Government's failure to provide adequate infrastructure for new housing developments? I campaigned long and hard for "I before E", or infrastructure before expansion in Milton Keynes, and the Government's response was to introduce a Milton Keynes tariff, where £18,500 is paid towards local infrastructure for every new house built. Unfortunately, with the economic downturn, not many houses are being built. With hindsight, does the Deputy Leader of the House think that any policy based on economic growth was probably slightly shortsighted?

Chris Bryant: It strikes me that the hon. Gentleman has probably not looked at the policy of "Sharing the proceeds of growth", which seemed to be based entirely on the presumption of growth into the future. We want to make sure that the economy continues to grow, but the most important point is the local issue and it relates primarily to local government in his area. That subject would be entirely appropriate for a debate in Westminster Hall.

Philip Davies: A coroner yesterday ruled that 10 servicemen including Flight Lieutenant Stead—a talented pilot whose parents live in my constituency—were unlawfully killed and accused the Ministry of Defence of systemic failures, including the failure to fit protective suppressant foam on their Hercules, which was shot down. Will the Deputy Leader of the House arrange for a Defence Minister to come to the House to explain why there were these systemic failures and why the Ministry of Defence is putting at risk the lives of people who should expect top protection from the Government? In an age when the Government have gone for health and safety gone mad in local authorities, why do they have such a cavalier approach to the safety of our servicemen?

Chris Bryant: Obviously the sympathy of the whole House goes to the families of those who died in the crash and we need to make sure that everything that can possibly be learnt from what the coroner came up with yesterday is learnt. The MOD has made it clear that it pays tribute to the work of the coroner, who it thinks has done a very thorough job in this case, and it intends to do precisely as I said. The hon. Gentleman quite often criticises health and safety legislation. Sometimes health and safety legislation does save lives.

Philip Hollobone: Every year hundreds of children are injured by fireworks, and while there is strong support for organised firework displays, there is growing concern about the antisocial use of fireworks and the distress they cause to both people and animals. With bonfire night approaching, could we have a topical debate or a debate in Westminster Hall on the Government's legislation with regard to the control of fireworks?

Chris Bryant: This matter comes up annually and every Member will have large numbers of constituents getting in touch with them to ask whether there should be further legislation on fireworks. When I was elected in 2001, there was practically no legislation on fireworks; it was pretty much an unrestricted market, except for the precise circumstances in which they could be sold. We have moved some considerable way. I find it slightly difficult to be an ardent repressor of fireworks because I rather like them.

Point of Order

12.26 pm

Julian Lewis: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. On a number of occasions you have expressed your concern about the use of amplifiers by protestors in Parliament square, and we had a meeting with representatives of Westminster council on this issue some months ago. We were told that the licence for the use of loudhailers would run out at the end of January this year and that we would be informed if any application was made to renew it. Evidently no such application has been made and yet the use of the loudhailers goes on persistently, incessantly and at unreasonable volume. Will you please consider writing to Westminster council and urging it to enforce the law, irrespective of the fact that the Government will bring forward new legislation that may affect this matter in the future? That has not happened yet, but the law of the land is as it is and should be enforced.

Mr. Speaker: I promise the hon. Gentleman and the House that I will look into this matter.

Topical Debate
	 — 
	Work and Skills

Tony McNulty: I beg to move,
	That the House has considered the matter of work and skills.
	I am very pleased that we are debating this extremely important issue today. I am conscious that I have taken up the post of Employment Minister at a time when the labour market faces great challenges as a result of the instability affecting the global economy, but I have already been struck not only by the important role that the DWP plays—in particular with Jobcentre Plus—but by the progress there has been in the services provided through the Jobcentre Plus network, in helping people to move away from dependence on benefits and into work, and by the range and complexity of the issues that it addresses daily.
	I am also keenly aware that topical debates are principally for Back Benchers, so half hours from me, from the hon. Member for Hertsmere (Mr. Clappison) and from the hon. Member for Rochdale (Paul Rowen) probably will not do. I do not want to take up too much time by way of introduction.
	I know that Jobcentre Plus operates in each and every one of our constituencies. Helping people into work and supporting them while they find it is the reason why it exists. We know that the continued success of Jobcentre Plus will be central to our ability to help those among our constituents affected by unemployment to get back into work as quickly as possible. I am very clear that the active system of support developed over the past couple of decades—I am happy to acknowledge that it came partly from the previous Government, but it has been greatly strengthened and deepened since 1997—puts the country in a far stronger position to deal with the consequences of the storms that have been affecting the world economy in recent weeks. However, we also need to be ready to do more and to respond quickly and flexibly to the new issues and challenges that we surely face. I want to spend what little time I have elaborating on the future, rather than on where we have come from.

Mark Pritchard: The Minister and I are former Harrow councillors, and I remember discussing unemployment in that area with him several years ago. Rising unemployment was a problem then as it is now. Will he look again at an issue that I raised when I served on the Work and Pensions Committee? Before the Government close Jobcentre Plus offices, will they look at the unemployment rate in the area? Does it not make sense that Jobcentre Plus offices should be retained in areas where unemployment is highest?

Tony McNulty: That is a fair point. I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making it clear that we served on Harrow council together, as the last time he mentioned it he talked of us being at Harrow together, with all the wrong connotations that that has. I am clearly not an old Harrovian.
	The point that the hon. Gentleman raises must be one of a range of considerations in the decision to close job centres. I should emphasise that we are shifting more and more staff to the front line to deal with people. One aspect of the expansion and improvement of the network is the fact that people are accessing the services of Jobcentre Plus in other ways than the old traditional method of going into the office. However, I take the broad point and I have in my diary a series of meetings with people who have such concerns.

Oliver Heald: In the Select Committee yesterday, we heard evidence that long-term unemployment is set to quadruple to some 600,000 a year. Does the Minister agree that it is a bit odd that a debate on this issue has not attracted a single Labour Back Bencher?

Tony McNulty: My hon. Friend the Member for Luton, North (Kelvin Hopkins) is in his place. Pointing to attendance is an easy game to play and I shall not get into it. I firmly and passionately believe that the Ulster Unionist party, Plaid Cymru, the SNP, the rest of the Liberal Democrats and my colleagues share our concerns about unemployment. I am not about to suggest at any stage in my speech that Labour Members, present or absent, have a monopoly on sentiment when it comes to the serious issue of unemployment— [I nterruption. ] Well, they are busy doing other things, probably not least helping people in their constituencies, given that this debate is subject to a one-line Whip. That is entirely a matter for them.
	The hon. Gentleman's first point, about the trends in unemployment and the extent to which we might see a rise in longer-term and harder-to-reach unemployed, is well made, and it goes to the point that I was about to make. Now is not the time to flinch on conditionality, pathways to work or providing active support for the unemployed. That happened—I am not making a political point—in the early 1980s, and we need to learn the lessons of that. I am happy to suggest that the Opposition have learned those lessons. Conditionality and helping the longer-term unemployed back into work remain uppermost in the work of Jobcentre Plus.

Simon Burns: Will the Minister give way?

Tony McNulty: I see that the Whip has moved from the Front Bench to the Back Bench, and I shall give way so that he can make his no doubt facetious point.

Simon Burns: I am disappointed that the Minister thinks that I wish to make a facetious point, given the seriousness of the problem of unemployment in Chelmsford and the east of England. What is he doing, with the Minister for the East of England, to address unemployment and the need for skills improvement? Can he also enlighten my constituents as to who is the Minister for the East of England?

Tony McNulty: That is a reasonable point. In the broader context, the National Economic Council, the regional economic councils that are being developed and the regional councils for Ministers are addressing the issue of unemployment, and working with local authorities and regional development agencies on that. I have yet to attend a council for Regional Ministers so the name of my hon. Friend escapes me, which I am sure will assist the hon. Gentleman in his attempt to be facetious— [I nterruption. ] No, the east of England has not escaped me— [In terruption. ] Well, that is a matter for the hon. Gentleman.
	The serious point was about the National Economic Council and regional economic development, and how unemployment fits in with that. That point was fairly made and I shall ensure that the hon. Gentleman gets a little paper outlining those structures. I do not know about the east of England, but I know that the east midlands already has in place regional economic forums that meet regularly to bring together all the key partners, including the RDA, the private sector, Jobcentre Plus and others, to discuss economic development and address any deterioration in the labour market. In any case, I say well done to the hon. Gentleman for making his facetious point.
	There continues to be a real dynamism in the labour market. There is a huge churn in jobs and vacancies, with people coming on to jobseeker's allowance and coming off it too. The picture is not static. The House will know that there are regularly as many as 600,000 vacancies, but that figure is also subject to churn. Some vacancies never reach those statistics because they are filled before they can be correlated with the figures.

Philip Hollobone: I am receiving a growing number of complaints from constituents who are taking up jobs after being out of work. They suffer from the delay between the immediate loss of benefits and the receipt of their first wage packet, which provides a clear disincentive to finding work for many people, especially single mothers in straitened circumstances. What steps are the Department taking to try to smooth that transition?

Tony McNulty: That is a fair point and I will look into the technicalities of it. The transition into work should be as smooth as possible, and there should be no disincentives en route. I am pleased that some 60 per cent. of JSA claimants get back to work within three months, and 80 per cent. do so within six months. Although we need to do better, those are phenomenal performance figures. Nobody yet knows the exact nature of the new inflow—to use the jargon that I have just learned, although I am trying to avoid it—as they may come from different sectors and geographic areas. It is almost a cliché now, but I have said in the past that Halifax and Bradford & Bingley are not simply brand names but places. In those places, there are many employees who are wondering about the consequences of the upheaval in the financial sector. I do not know how that will shake out, but Jobcentre Plus is considering what will happen when a newer cohort of financial professionals presents in greater numbers than they have done before. We need to start looking at such issues.

John Penrose: The Minister mentioned the dynamism of the labour market. Does he accept that part of the problem with the current unemployment figures is the churn caused by people getting a short-term job, then losing it and going back into unemployment? Some of that is negative, rather than evidence of dynamism in the job market. It is important for the Government to ensure that jobs are sustainable, and they may need sustaining through Government help in the crucial first weeks and months.

Tony McNulty: I accept that. That is why I tried to use dynamism in the most literal sense, to mean a lot of change and a lot of activity. There will be those who will come on to employment at the shorter-term end, and we need to stop that. Increasingly, particularly with some of the harder-to-reach groups, that means we must ensure that when we say that they are ready to work, they are ready to work and can do so in a sustained fashion. I accept that it is in no one's interest to have a merry-go-round of on-off claimants.
	The answer to the question asked earlier by the hon. Member for West Chelmsford (Mr. Burns) is that the Minister for the East of England is my hon. Friend the Member for Stevenage (Barbara Follett).

Simon Burns: Was that answer from the Box?

Tony McNulty: No, it was just inspiration from somewhere or other. Where it came from is not the hon. Gentleman's concern.
	I take the point made by the hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose) about sustainability. I repeat the fact that 80 per cent. of reported people who go on to jobseeker's allowance get back into work within six months. That is a very good figure, but clearly we need to do better; we need to ensure greater sustainability. There will always be a hard core of people who go into work, come out, go back in, and then come out. We need to try to prevent that, especially in the hardest-to-reach groups, such as lone parents and others.

Kelvin Hopkins: I congratulate my right hon. Friend on his promotion and on his new job. He talked about Bradford & Bingley, the financial markets and what has happened. That catastrophe has occurred because financial markets have been left to themselves and globalised without intervention or regulation. Is not the same true of skills? If we leave skills to be developed by the markets, by people learning on the job and by people picking things up, we will suffer the same disadvantage, with other developed nations. Does my right hon. Friend accept that we have to be proactive, to drive skills forward and to teach young people rigorously to ensure that they have the skills and that we do not suffer such disadvantages in future?

Tony McNulty: I agree with much of what my hon. Friend says. I do not agree that there is now a mixed economy, for want of a better phrase, in skills provision or that there has been a laissez-faire approach that has somehow led to a diminution in the importance of skills. I do not think that that is necessarily accurate. The work that the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills is doing alongside the Department for Work and Pensions is very important and there has been much progress.
	I agree with my hon. Friend that in much of the other work that DWP and Jobcentre Plus are doing we need to start looking forward and to understand the consequences of the economic turbulence, not least in the financial sector, and to respond accordingly to what we think the future of skills provision might look like. I can assure my hon. Friend that a lot of close work takes place between the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, my Department and others in that regard, in trying to preserve people in their jobs, to support sectors and to encourage reskilling and refocusing where possible. I was going to come on to that in the short time that I have left.
	My hon. Friend will know that in collaboration with the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills we announced last week a cash injection of some £100 million over the next three years to help people who are newly redundant, or who face redundancy, to move into another job quickly by supporting them to refresh their skills or to retrain. Earlier this week, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills announced a £350 million fund that will refocus the in-work support available through Train to Gain to help small businesses deal with the tougher economic climate by developing the skills of the staff.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Luton, North might not yet have seen the details of the announcement by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform of his wider solutions for business and of the company support package that was announced earlier today.

Oliver Heald: Is this really new money? The £350 million Train to Gain budget was already there. Is the £100 million genuinely new money or is it a re-announcement?

Tony McNulty: I said very clearly that the £350 million was about a refocus given the context of the situation. I was not saying that it was new money. At the moment, the £100 million is made up of £50 million of new money, via the European Social Fund, and £50 million of Train to Gain money, refocused and reprioritised. It must be right for us to refocus and reprioritise, given the extraordinarily fast pace of change in the wider economy.
	I want to discuss the matter in more detail with the relevant Ministers, but I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Luton, North that there is an issue about the wider life skills that people are getting in schools. If the future is to be a far more credit-restricted period than otherwise, the notion from the 1980s and 1990s that people could secure credit for anything they liked, any time they liked, must change. That level of responsibility and focus on the individual through their life skills is probably something that we need to do more about. I do not accept, either from the DWP perspective or that of DIUS—I was trying to resist saying DIUS—that the circumstances of the provider, whether they are private, third sector or public sector, determine the level of professionalism in what they offer.
	Notwithstanding the point made by the hon. Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald), the money that we are making available along with the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, the greater focus on Train to Gain, what my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform has said today about support for business and the announcements already made—

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order.

James Clappison: We, too, welcome the opportunity to debate work and skills, but before we do so I want to welcome the Minister to his new post. We look forward to debating these issues with him. For quite how long we will be able to do so, I do not know. He will be aware that there was a major reshuffle in the Government ranks just before the summer recess. In fact, so far this year every member of the ministerial team has changed, including the Secretary of State. The right hon. Gentleman's predecessor was in place for only nine months, and his predecessor for only six months. The right hon. Gentleman might just have enough time to master the jargon and wish us "Merry Christmas and a happy new year" before he is on his way again. However, we look forward to debating with him in the time that is left.
	This is a Government debate in Government time. We note the level of participation on the Labour Benches, although we look forward to having a debate with the hon. Member for Luton, North (Kelvin Hopkins) as well as with the sole representative of the Liberal Democrats and my colleagues in the Opposition. Notwithstanding that limited participation— [ Interruption. ] The hon. Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) is a latecomer to the debate, in quite what circumstances I do not know.
	Notwithstanding the levels of participation on the Government Benches, we understand the salience of this subject to our country today. It is certainly not lessened by last week's news on unemployment. That news makes it all the more important that we should have an effective system for helping people to get off benefits and into work and, in the case of the newly unemployed, preventing an undoubted blow from becoming a longer-term tragedy.
	This time last week, I was in the jobcentre in Harlow, hearing first hand what is happening. Part of the picture seems to be that alongside the rise in the number of people becoming unemployed, there is a reduction in the number of job vacancies. I know that Ministers are apt to talk about the level of vacancies, but I have to tell this Minister that people are reporting fewer vacancies. That is the real experience of people looking for jobs.
	The Minister mentioned the situation with Bradford & Bingley and the pain that job losses can cause. In fact, several hundred of the job losses announced by Bradford & Bingley fell in my constituency, in the town of Borehamwood. I was in the jobcentre in Borehamwood a fortnight ago. My hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose) made a good point about helping people who have come from financial service backgrounds to find work. The Minister's response to it was also well made. We will certainly work together with the Government on that.

Oliver Heald: Vacancies are often mentioned as a sign of dynamism in the labour market, but is my hon. Friend aware that the number has roughly halved since July 2004? It has gone down from about 1 million to about 575,000. The number of vacancies usually halves in a recession. That will mean that if we go into recession, we will be looking not at a dynamic labour market but a stultified one.

James Clappison: My hon. Friend makes a very important point about statistical trends, and it is borne out by what people tell us that they experience when looking for a job.
	Quite apart from people who are unemployed and in the job market, there is a longer-term problem that we must not lose sight of. Behind the unemployment statistics, there is a picture of deep-rooted worklessness and economic inactivity that has persisted for a number of years. It has been aggravated by a lack of skills in key areas and in some sections of the population.
	The official measure puts unemployment at 1.79 million, but we know that millions more people who are not in the labour market are economically inactive for a number of different reasons. The national statistician has told me that, of the people who are economically inactive—and quite apart from those measured as unemployed—there are 2 million who say that they would like to get a job. In many cases, they could get a job with the right help and support but, as matters stand, that is not always available for them. It may be that many of them are present in the ranks of those in receipt of incapacity benefit, and at 2.6 million people that remains a stubbornly high figure. It is a particular worry that, in the past seven years, the number of claimants in receipt of incapacity benefit for more than five years has increased by 270,000—a total that accounts for the majority of incapacity benefit claimants.
	All too often, existing claimants have been put at the back of the queue. It is very much part of our thinking that, wherever possible, we want to help all economically inactive people, including the hardest to help. I invite the Minister to turn his attention to our policy proposals in that regard.

David Drew: With that in mind, does the hon. Gentleman not think it rather strange that the Department should continue to remove people working in Jobcentre Plus? Would he like to join the campaign of the Public and Commercial Services Union to draw attention to the need to stop that? Does he agree that there should be a moratorium on those job losses?

James Clappison: We would certainly join forces with the hon. Gentleman and others in giving individual help to people. I invite him to look at our proposals to put in place a funding mechanism to allow that help to be provided, including to the hardest to help. Under our proposals, they would not be at the back of the queue while the "easier" people are helped first.
	We should not allow ourselves to be misled by the picture that is sometimes painted about the level of employment in the UK. In part, that picture reflects the number of people from both inside and outside the EU who come here to work. In those circumstances, talking about the level of employment is not the same as getting economically inactive people back to work. Ministers need to be aware of the scale of what is happening with people from inside and outside the EU coming here to work, and its effect on the employment level.
	Two weeks ago, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions asserted that
	"800,000 more UK-born people are in work than there were in 1997."—[ Official Report, 7 October 2008; Vol. 480, c. 205.]
	A different complexion is put on that figure by what the national statistician told me this week in a written parliamentary answer. She said that, over the same period, 1.7 million people who are non-UK born have found work in the UK.
	Similar deep-rooted problems exist in the field of youth unemployment. It is a simple yet salutary fact that, despite all the claims made for the new deal, there are more unemployed 16 to 24-year-olds in the country today than there were in 1997. That may have been what led the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) to write of the new deal a week ago:
	"It is little short of a calamity: 300,000 new dealers under 25 have had to enrol twice on the course, 88,000 have enrolled for a third time and more than 25,500 have started the scheme four or more times. The number of young people not in employment, education or training is at a record level".
	Although I might not go quite as far as the right hon. Gentleman in calling the new deal a "calamity", I hope that we can all accept the finding of the recent report from the Social Market Foundation. It said that the recent performance of the new deal had been less than impressive and that the number of job outcomes had "dropped significantly". I hope that we can make common cause on the new deal, as the Minister's predecessor, the present Financial Secretary to the Treasury, wrote the foreword to the report and welcomed it.
	It is welcome that the Government have recognised the problems with the new deal, and that they have decided, in effect, to abolish the substance of the new deal programmes. We want to take a constructive approach to bringing help to unemployed and economically inactive people. We have brought forward our own proposals, and I commend them to the Minister. We have advocated the early assessment of people's needs, tailoring support to individual needs, sustained support, mentoring, getting people into sustainable jobs—an important thing in the present economic climate—and putting in place the funding mechanism that I have mentioned already and that will enable all that to be achieved.
	Of course, equipping people with the right skills will be very important in helping them to find work. It will also help to keep people in work who have found work after being unemployed, and help those who have yet to enter the labour market. Skills are vital for obtaining work and for making progress once in work. The Minister may have wanted to say a little more about skills if time had permitted, but the Opposition have brought forward our own very significant policy proposals in that regard.
	We are conscious of the background to the problem and of the challenges ahead, and recognise that much remains to be done to ensure that skills are as widespread as possible in our country. We understand that there are 5 million adults who are functionally illiterate, and several hundred thousand young people who are not in any kind of education, employment or training.

John Penrose: It was welcome to hear the Minister set out a couple of examples of how the Train to Gain budget will be refocused. As far as I can see, the Train to Gain process has involved an awful lot of certification of people who already have skills, and not much in the way of the creation of added-value skills. In many cases, it has created a huge deadweight cost, with Government money used to pay for training that was already going to happen under existing company budgets.

James Clappison: My hon. Friend makes his point extremely well. Far too much of what has been claimed to have been achieved has been the assessment and certification of skills that people already have. That has taken precedence over giving people the skills that they need, especially in the work place. I am very interested to hear that the Train to Gain money is to be refocused. I am not sure what that means in this context, but doubtless we shall find out in the fullness of time.
	It is common ground between us that more needs to be done to help people to reach higher levels of skill. Last year, the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills accepted that we must do better if we are to be competitive in a global economy and to offer new opportunities. To achieve that, however, we need to have the right framework in place.
	I remember when the Bill that became the Learning and Skills Act 2000 passed through this House. It established the learning and skills councils to fulfil the role of providing people with skills and apprenticeships, and replaced the training and enterprise councils, even though they had a successful track record of devolving responsibility to the local level and involving private enterprise. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) played a large part in setting up the TECs, and I recall him describing the LSCs as being merely a change for change's sake.
	On top of that, we now have more change. Just a few years on, it seems that the LSCs were not the answer after all. They are to be replaced by three new bodies, to add to the pantheon of bodies that are involved in the provision of training and further education. The Government now say, as the Secretary of State the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills put it, that they want to put
	"employers at the heart of the skills system."—[ Official Report, 18 July 2007; Vol. 463, c. 298.]
	That is precisely where employers were before the Government interfered with the training network in the first place.
	We have brought forward our proposals on skills. Putting skills in the work place and putting employers in charge of providing them is at the core of our proposals. We want to bring help to small and medium-sized enterprises to enable them to do that. We want the process to give special help to them and to the people whom we now call NEETs—not in employment, education or training. We also want to give a better deal for adult community learning.
	We have a very wide agenda on skills. We recognise that there is a need for fresh thinking on the subject, and we will provide it.

Kelvin Hopkins: I came along to make one or two interventions, but I am pleased to have the opportunity to make a slightly longer speech. I am a co-chair of the all-party group on further education and lifelong learning, and I am glad to see my fellow co-chair, the hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose), in the Chamber. I used to teach in further education, and have a long-term interest in skills; I used to read and write a lot about the subject in my time as a trade union research officer. I have always had a deep concern about the poor skills of so many of our fellow countrymen and women when it comes to employment.
	In recent years, the Moser report has pointed out that half the population are not functionally numerate. Indeed, 50 per cent. of the population do not understand what 50 per cent. means. We have a problem that has not been addressed at school level, let alone at training level. During the 1980s and 1990s, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research undertook lots of research comparing us with other countries. It found that in Germany, apprentices would typically have many hours of pedagogy—rigorous teaching—every week. When that was explained to those who led the training and skills industry in Britain, the response was, "Well, that wouldn't be appropriate in the British context." That was just a cop-out; they were not prepared to undertake that level of skills provision.
	Comparisons were made between apprentices in France and Britain. It was found that apprentices in France knew basic mathematics, and when they took a very simple mathematical test they could get all the questions right in a few minutes. In Britain, a comparable group of apprentices could not do any of the sums at all. There were serious problems at a very basic level. Those problems are still there. I will say to my right hon. Friend the Minister that the Government have recognised that and are trying to deal with it, particularly at school level, but we have not got there yet. My concern is that we have not much considered the interface between the teacher or lecturer and the apprentice, schoolchild or student. We do not deal with the issue at that level.

Oliver Heald: I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman remembers the report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Centre for the Economics of Education on the extent to which qualifications give a person an earnings advantage in the labour market, but its findings on level 2 national vocational qualifications were stark: they had no impact at all, although level 3 qualifications did. Does he not agree that there is a strong lesson there on how we build apprenticeships and the sort of qualifications that really count to employers?

Kelvin Hopkins: My concern is that we have a lot of qualifications, but underneath the qualification the level of skill is often inadequate. German factory workers can typically not only do mathematics but speak a foreign language. They can handle a foreign language, and their language, very well. We are failing in that. The OECD has shown time and again that the gulf between the best educated—the highest achievers in Britain—and the lowest achievers is wider than that in almost any other country in the developed world. We have to address that problem.
	There has been a lot of debate about the fact that we are facing a recession, in which there will be unemployment. There will not be jobs. It is obvious that supply-side reforms, welcome though they are, will not solve a demand-side problem. I am glad to say that last weekend, the Chancellor mentioned the great John Maynard Keynes again. I used to teach economics, and Keynes used to be highly regarded—in fact, I still regard him highly—but we have been through a period of madness in which lesser brains have dominated the economic policy agenda. About 15 years ago, I had a debate over lunch with a former deputy economic adviser to the Treasury. I asked him a simple economic question; he could not answer it and lost his temper. I suspect that Keynes would not have done that. According to last night's  Evening Standard, even Bertrand Russell found Keynes's intelligence intimidating. I do not think that any of the monetarists intimidate me. We have to look to some of the Keynesian recipes, used in the '30s to solve our problems. When the economy recovers, we will need people to be skilled. The modern world cannot rely on people just picking things up on the job, without being able to do mathematics or even handle their own language very well. We have to tackle those basic skills problems.
	There are many small companies, and many more smaller companies today, and some apprenticeships cannot be sustained by them. They are fearful of taking on an apprentice because they fear that once the apprentice is trained, he or she will get a job with someone else who pays better. One case that I have written to Ministers about concerns those in the historic vehicle restoration business. Apprentices in that business are highly skilled, but as soon as they are trained, they can get much better paid jobs in the motor sector looking after insurance repair jobs. People in that field are very highly paid; of course, insurance companies pay well for cars to be repaired. Apprentices have to be sustained properly in such small companies. The only way to ensure that is to place a levy—based on turnover, not headcount—on all companies, so that the whole economy pays to sustain apprenticeships, particularly among small companies. I hope that I can urge my right hon. Friend the Minister to persuade his friends in other Departments that the issue is important.
	I have said most of the things that I wanted to say. Many other Members want to speak—

Simon Burns: Really?

Kelvin Hopkins: Perhaps hon. Members came just to listen to my speech, but I guess that they do want to speak. I am grateful to have had this opportunity, and hope that some of my points will be taken on board.

Paul Rowen: I too welcome the Minister to his position. It is the first time that we have debated together. I welcome the opportunity to debate this issue, given the context: last week, the largest rise in unemployment for 17 years was announced, bringing the figure up to 1.79 million. It is likely to rise to more than 2 million by Christmas, so the issue is obviously important.
	I begin by concentrating on what the hon. Member for Luton, North (Kelvin Hopkins) said. It is true that, when it comes to skills, this country has let itself down in the past. The Leitch review set us ambitious literacy and numeracy targets. In 2005, some 85 per cent. of adults were classed as numerate, and 79 per cent. as literate; we are planning to get that figure up to 95 per cent. Those are ambitious, difficult targets.
	The centrepiece of the Government's skills policy in the past has been Train to Gain. I note what the Minister said earlier about refocusing that, and moving £50 million from the Train to Gain pot and using it to deal with unemployment. The Train to Gain pot, which will be £1 billion by 2011, has been consistently underspent. A statement was issued recently, which I have not seen, to say that £350 million of that money will be refocused on small and medium employers. I would certainly welcome more information on how that will happen. It is quite clear that employers have not taken up the Train to Gain money because of the often bureaucratic and difficult process that they had to go through to access it. I welcome anything that makes that process easier.
	It is true that in a period of recession—I heard what the Secretary of State said on the subject last week—we have to learn the lessons from the previous recession before deciding what to do. It should not just be a case of paying people benefit once they are unemployed, as happened in the past. We need to do more to help them to find employment and to do gainful work.

David Drew: My area has a particular problem: young people of no fixed abode come to it to look for work. They are in a double bind. The situation is different now because of the lack of affordable housing in places such as Stroud. Will the hon. Gentleman accept that the problem is not just about finding someone a job? Often it is about finding them accommodation so that they can get a job.

Paul Rowen: I agree, and later I shall come to what we can do to deal with those two problems. This month, the number of jobseekers has risen from 31,800 to 929,900. I accept the point that the Minister made: people are moving in and out of those figures. Nevertheless, the large number of long-term unemployed is an issue of concern.
	I want to talk a little about what the Government can and should do to get more people back into work. I want to use as an example some of the work that my local council in Rochdale has done to get people into work, because that is vital. Rochdale has set up a joint project with Oldham called J21, which is tied to the development of the large industrial development at Kingsway. Between them, members of the Kingsway recruitment team have trained 1,300 people and helped get them into work over the past two years.
	In Rochdale and elsewhere, however, there has been a large increase in the number of redundancies. I do not know whether the Minister saw the announcement last week by MFI that a number of its stores would close. After the receiver looked at which stores were viable, the closure of 86 stores was announced. That announcement was made in a national newspaper—the  Daily Mirror—last Friday. If employers are to issue redundancy notices by that method, it brings into question how such things are done and what is the right way of going about it. There was no warning to the employees who were affected: they read it in the newspaper. If unemployment is going to rise, we must make sure that we have mechanisms in place to deal with that. The Minister's commitment not to close Jobcentre Plus offices in areas with high unemployment is therefore welcome.

John Penrose: I am glad that the hon. Gentleman mentioned redundancies. Does he agree that, particularly with the announcement of redundancies for people who are middle-aged or older in the jobs market, it is unfortunate that in the past couple of years the Government have begun to focus further education funding on training for people who are under 19 and certainly under 25? FE's traditional role to reskill people in their 30s, 40s and 50s after involuntary redundancy has been lost, and that will impact materially on the ability of those people to retrain and to get jobs in this difficult economic climate.

Paul Rowen: I completely agree, which is why I am interested in knowing what the Minister meant when he spoke about refocusing Train to Gain. In the next few years, we will not be talking so much about upskilling as about reskilling.
	In that context, I wish to raise the issue of adult apprenticeships. The Government put £25 million into that pot last year, and the figure will rise in a couple of years to £90 million. Given what we are going through, the Minister needs to look at whether that pot of money can be substantially increased. By comparison, nearly £1 billion is being spent on youth apprentices—I have no problem with that, and welcome the provision for more youth apprentices—but more adults will be unemployed, so there is a definite need to ensure that the issue is addressed.
	I am running out of time, but I believe two more things must happen. We need to make sure that we achieve better links with housing and that we use different projects to do so. The Chancellor has said that projects will be brought forward, and I should like commitments to be written into those projects to—

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Gentleman has used up his time allocation.

Oliver Heald: I begin by welcoming the commitment of the Liberal Democrat spokesman, the hon. Member for Rochdale (Paul Rowen), to the Conservative policy of strengthening and increasing the number of apprenticeships. We started doing that in government, as it was Lord David Hunt who came up with modern apprenticeships schemes as a way of improving young people's education. It is something on which the Government, to give them their due, have built, but we would like to expand it still further.

John Penrose: Does my hon. Friend agree that an awful lot of the Government's claimed increase in the number of apprenticeships is, in fact, a rather creative piece of accounting, because modern apprenticeships were all level 3 and above, whereas the figures for what are now called higher apprenticeships have dropped substantially since 2001? All the increases have taken place in modern apprenticeships at level 2, which offer substantially less valuable employment opportunities.

Oliver Heald: I agree. I was going to make the point that level 2 does not really hack it, and that we need to provide apprenticeships at level 3. We must move people at level 2 to level 3 if we are to achieve gains in employability and the amount they can earn, which is increased by having better qualifications.
	At the outset of my contribution, may I make a point about topical debates? I was a member of the Modernisation Committee, and I am a strong supporter of topical debates. However, they depend on the Leader of the House choosing a topic that the House wants to discuss and considers topical. The Minister should report back to the Leader of the House on today's feeble attendance. Work and skills was a subject that Labour Members used to debate the whole time, particularly when the economy was doing better and the labour market was stronger. Today, to have literally one Government Member giving a speech, when the Leader of the House herself chose the subject, is not good enough, and it will lead to topical debates dying out if things carry on like this. The Minister may like that idea, but I do not.
	I have followed the labour market a good deal over the years: I served on the Employment Committee, I was Conservative spokesman on the subject, and so on. Earlier this year, I was concerned that the quarterly survey published by the recruitment industry showed that the industry was robust in finding short-term positions for people, but that permanent positions were proving hard to fill. That is often a precursor of a recession: companies across the country are not prepared to make the commitment to the long-term employment for staff. Recent figures show that the claimant count has increased by 31,800, and the labour force survey showed an increase in unemployment of 164,000. The projections from the think-tanks are alarming. Yesterday, the chief economist of the Social Market Foundation gave evidence to the Select Committee on Work and Pensions and said that his estimate was that long-term unemployment, which is just under 150,000, would quadruple over the next couple of years to 600,000.
	Recently, the Ernst &Young ITEM club produced a survey on the overall scale of unemployment, both short and long-term, and suggested that the claimant count would double. Against that background, the Government must review their policies on employability practices. I wrote a pamphlet about trying to audit the new deal in 2004 entitled "Auditing the New Deal: What Figures for the Future?", in which I made the point—and I think that many people agreed—that providers of the new deal made quite a bit of money on the back of the general improvement in the labour market. The labour market expanded and, yes, people found jobs, but no one who looked at the issue seriously was of the view that many of those jobs were the result of someone having a new deal interview. When the Government hit their target of 250,000 young people going into employment, the National Audit Office produced a report saying that only about 8,000 of that total would not have found work anyway. Of course, 8,000 is something, but it is nothing like what was being claimed.
	The Minister should accept as part of his new responsibilities that the new deal was a policy that appeared to work well when the wind was behind it, the labour market was expanding and all was set fair. Now that we are in a situation in which it appears that the opposite is going to happen and that there will be a contraction in the labour market, the Government must look again at their capacity to deal with unemployment and how they will deal with the longer-term unemployed.
	It is often said that there are many vacancies in the economy. It is true that there are about 575,000 vacancies in our economy, but in 2004 there were almost 1 million. The last time we had a major recession was in 1990-91 and, in that recession, the number of vacancies halved and unemployment rose sharply. If, as seems to be the case, we are to have a major recession, all sorts of assumptions that the Government have been making about a flexible new deal must be changed.
	In my pamphlet, I suggested that we needed to focus the effort on the people who had genuine barriers to employment and tailor the packages to their needs. There should be an early triage to find out what the problems are—the person may be an alcoholic, may be unable to read and write, or may have one of the other classic barriers to employment—and to offer them without delay a tailored package probably provided by the private sector or the not-for-profit sector.
	I pointed to the evidence in America, which was very promising. Since then, as has been said, there have been reports about the Wisconsin experience, which has been remarkable. By means of tailored packages, the claimant count there has been reduced by 80 per cent. in three years. That is a tremendous achievement. Such focused approaches are the right way forward. Although it does not go as far as I would like—it does not have the triage and there are faults with it—the flexible new deal is a step in the right direction.
	However, all the prime contractors who are waiting for the Government's decision next February have been assuming that the labour market would be roughly what it had been. The Government are producing performance targets that the prime contractors are supposed to aim at. Those targets do not assume that we will have a quadrupling of long-term unemployment. If we do, the prime contractors will have a number of problems. First, do they have the capacity to cope with 600,000 rather than about 150,000 unemployed? That is a massively higher number. Secondly, the flexible new deal is outcome-based, so the payments are back-loaded. That means that the prime contractors are taking on substantial risk while the individuals receive advice, their tailored packages, and so on.
	It is one thing to take a risk on 100,000 people; it is quite another to take a risk on 600,000. The capital needed to be able to do that would be substantial. As the Minister is starting afresh in his role, will he have a serious look at whether the model will work in the world of employment that we are entering, or whether it is necessary for the Government to think again about how they underpin the flexible new deal to ensure that the capacity exists?
	It is all very well speaking about prime contractors, but others are involved. There are the subcontractors—good-hearted charities, voluntary bodies and not-for-profit providers who desperately want to help people with social and medical problems. There are the individuals themselves. Some of the most vulnerable people in our society are in that category of the long-term unemployed. For the sake of the small subcontractors—the good people who want to do good works—and the individuals and for the sake of the overall financial model, will the Minister examine that model carefully to ensure that it is robust?
	The flexible new deal is a much better model than the old new deal, which was about box-ticking and taking credit for the rise in the jobs market. It would be a pity if one looked back at the improvement in what is being done and considered it a failure because the background had changed at a crucial time.

John Penrose: Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the factors that the Minister should consider in dealing with the risk that my hon. Friend is describing is that any contractor should have a substantial capital cushion? Contractors must have a big enough balance sheet to be able to absorb the risks of the economic cycle and to ride out the ups and downs. It may also be necessary for the Government to consider differential payments in the case of those who are hardest to help and furthest from the job market. Success in getting someone like that into work would result in a much higher payment than getting someone into work who is well skilled, does not have the sort of barriers that others might have and is easier to get into employment.

Oliver Heald: I am grateful to my hon. Friend. The next point that I had intended to make was about the winner's curse, and the point beyond that was about the differential—

John Penrose: I am sorry to have pre-empted my hon. Friend.

Oliver Heald: Not at all. It is good that we are thinking along the same lines.
	With reference to the winner's curse, if it is simply a matter of quoting the lowest price, there is the risk that the contractor who gets the job may not be robust enough or have enough capital to provide the service in difficult times. If the figure of 600,000 long-term unemployed is realistic and those people cannot be placed in employment because long-term unemployment is rising and the general background is poor, the financial risk could be significant. My hon. Friend made the point more succinctly.
	Some of those with barriers to employment need a great deal of help. They are people with substance abuse problems, people with a history of back trouble, which can be expensive to cure, and people who have mental health problems and a range of other difficulties. It is necessary to make sure that the rewards for getting those people into work are high enough to ensure that that happens.
	The evidence from Australia is that the people nearest the labour market were finding work—being pushed across the line—rather than those who were the hardest to help, where the benefit to society would be greatest and the premium should be adequate. There is a case for having a tariff for getting into work the hardest to help, and that tariff should take account of the four or five main conditions that people with barriers to employment have.
	Finally, I shall say a word about skills, if I may do so without trespassing on the good will of the House. My first point is about literacy and numeracy, a topic on which I spoke recently during the Committee stage of the Education and Skills Bill. It is true that it is much more difficult to get a job if one cannot read, write and add up properly. It is at least 12 per cent. more difficult for people in that tier to get a job and their earnings are lower. Functional illiteracy is often associated with a household that is deprived, with poor health and with a household where the head of the household is an unskilled worker who is also often unable to read and write. The problem is thus generational, leading to a cycle of deprivation.

Kelvin Hopkins: I am interested in what the hon. Gentleman is saying about children from illiterate households who cannot read. Has he seen the recent television coverage of the use of phonics to get those children reading, and what wonderful results were achieved?

Oliver Heald: That is exactly the point. I have a very good special school in my constituency, Woolgrove, which takes youngsters who one might think would never learn to read, but they do. It is because the school uses methods such as synthetic phonics. If a child with such obstacles can be taught to read using synthetic phonics, it is madness not to provide the same service to people who do not have those special barriers. Yes, let us make sure that we use synthetic phonics and teach our young people to read.
	Although we welcome the fact that the Minister and his colleagues are trying to rescue those who did not learn to read at school and bring them back, it should never have got to that point. The problem should have been solved when the youngsters were seven or six, not when they are 17, 18, 25 or much older. I applaud the fact that the Government are trying to rescue the situation, but things should never have gone that far.
	My second point is about level 2 qualifications. According to all the research, graduates are likely to earn 71 per cent. more than those with no qualifications; the figure is 50 per cent. more for those with two good A-levels or an apprenticeship at level 3. Level 2 qualifications, however, do not give a gain, yet a lot of the Government's effort is going into level 2.
	The Minister has a difficult job at a difficult time, but let us try to get things right. The hon. Member for Luton, North (Kelvin Hopkins) made the point that other countries are rigorous about apprenticeships and professional qualifications of that sort and that people there are taught at level 3. If, as Ministers say, an educational ladder of opportunity has to be climbed—and Leitch did say that beyond 2020 there would be very few jobs for people without qualifications—it is not good enough to teach people something; they have to get to a level that is higher than the one there used to be. The Government accept that, but level 2 is not the answer. Level 3 is what we should aim for. A topical debate on an important subject is the sort of debate that we should be having, but it is a pity that more Members have not been here.

John Howell: I want to pick up on the skills aspect, about which my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald) has been talking. I want to consider how the skills agenda is playing out on the ground and in practice. I shall do that from the perspective of my constituency, to the extent that it illustrates a number of broader points.
	I want to illustrate what is at stake in getting the skills mix right for my constituency. It is home to a centre of world expertise in nuclear fusion technology at Culham. The centre is a place of not only cutting-edge science, but cutting-edge engineering. In January, the centre will hold an exhibition here, and I hope that Members will take the opportunity to see the skills on display. Those skills are not required only for the current project, which has a finite life; they are also required as a major part of skills export from the UK to the fusion projects throughout the world in the coming years, in which engineering expertise at Culham will play a major part for the foreseeable future.
	The centre is not an isolated example; it is part of an arc of technology and engineering that stretches from my constituency into that of my hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (Mr. Vaizey), which includes Harwell, the Rutherford Appleton laboratory and the new Diamond Light Source project, from which no self-respecting medical research company will want to be more than spitting distance in future because of the enormous scientific and technological expertise that it offers.
	What is at stake in getting the skills mix right is the international competitiveness of that whole arc of science and technology in an area that is genuinely world class and cutting edge. Taking forward the skills agenda on the ground is therefore causing considerable local concern, which is caused principally by the lack of flexibility in delivering the skills agenda on the ground and ensuring that it matches skills training with local requirements. The consistent complaints that I get from organisations across the board, in both the private and public sectors, is that Jobcentre Plus, the Learning and Skills Council and programmes such as Train to Gain are far too driven by top-down national policy and fail to give enough recognition to huge local variations.
	Let me give an example of such a variation in the context of Train to Gain. My constituency lies in a county that has very few benefit claimants of working age; the number is half the national average and lower even than that of the rest of the south-east. Claimants for jobseeker allowances account for less than 1 per cent. Some 84 per cent. of employment is at the top end, much of it in the service sector. Some 70 per cent. of adults of working age already have a level 2 qualification, and almost 84 per cent. have a level 1 qualification. That leaves 7 per cent. with no qualification at all, and it is right that skills programmes should address that 7 per cent., who are already a major feature of a considerable amount of co-ordinated local activity from a number of organisations in the public and private sectors.
	To pick up on the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hertfordshire about children and teaching in schools, I should say that I am seeing innovative work in trying to use children who have been well taught as an influence on parents and grandparents who have had a bad experience of education, so that those parents and grandparents can be brought back to some form of education and skills training.
	However, in the round, the distribution of training in my area is clearly skewed to level 1 and 2 qualifications, and not to levels 3, 4 and above, which the area needs if it is to maintain its international competitiveness in scientific and technology establishments, which are intensive in research and development. I receive complaints that the parachuting in of Train to Gain is more about achieving a uniform approach than about recognising the need for that flexibility. Further education colleges have expressed concern that the constraints on training have been too great. Initially, the colleges welcomed the prospect of those constraints being relaxed and of the £350 million announced in the recent ministerial statement. However, as time goes on they are getting more and more suspicious that that is taking their eye off the need for front-line skills, which are suffering in comparison with back-office skills.

John Penrose: Does my hon. Friend agree that the issue is not only about recognising the local skills needs of the employers in a particular area, important though that is? It is also about making sure that people providing training understand the skills shortfalls in the local unemployed population. Those will also vary very significantly, depending on the local community and its cultural background. The training has to be tailored to match. If we get one side of the calculation right, we have to make sure that the other side balances as well.

John Howell: I thank my hon. Friend for that valid point, which illustrates again the need for flexibility and for things to be tailored. May I also congratulate him on being the first Member to have intervened on a speech that I have made since I have come to this House? [Hon. Members: "Hear, hear!"]
	I return to the point about the focus on back-office skills within the refocusing of Train to Gain. I have to say that that is of no interest to businesses in my constituency, which have taken matters into their own hands, with my encouragement. Businesses in Henley have put together a scheme to draw on the expertise of a considerable number of successful entrepreneurs, chief executives and people who have run successful small and medium-sized businesses. As an act of community participation, those people are prepared to put in time, free of charge, to make sure that businesses in the area are up to scratch and maintain their competitiveness and skills.

Kelvin Hopkins: rose—

John Howell: I think that I am going to be intervened on for a second time.

Kelvin Hopkins: The distinction of second intervener is one of which I am very proud.
	The hon. Gentleman has been talking about his constituency, which is a fine place with lots of highly educated and skilled people. However, have not the Government a duty to try to compensate in areas without such advantages and where skills have to be driven much harder if there are to be better opportunities in future?

John Howell: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his point. I agree with him, and he has illustrated my point that one size does not fit all and that things need to be much more tailored to the needs of individual areas. I do not doubt that my constituency and the area around it are full of advantages that are not shared elsewhere, but that is precisely the point that I am making in this speech.

Oliver Heald: My hon. Friend now has a hat trick of interventions.
	Does my hon. Friend agree that half the vacancies nationally are hard to fill or due to skills shortage? That is a worse problem in an area such as the east or the south-east than in some of the areas that the hon. Member for Luton, North (Kelvin Hopkins) mentioned. It is not true that skills shortages are worse in the most deprived areas.

John Howell: I thank my hon. Friend for making that point. As I said, it is important to ensure that skills programmes address the 7 per cent. who have no qualifications at all, particularly in an area such as the south-east, which has certain advantages and where there is a lot of top-end loading on the skills side.
	The break-up of the Learning and Skills Council and the establishment of local strategic partnerships offers hope that resources can be focused on local priorities. As hon. Members have said, it is crucial that local business plays an important part of any such partnership. Personally, I think that it is useful if those partnerships are led by businesses providing practical input right from the top. However, participating businesses are concerned that they will, in any case, ultimately fall foul of Government micro-management of the whole process.
	There are four main concerns. First, the market is too complex and confusing for those seeking training and for employers. Secondly, Train to Gain is poorly understood. Thirdly, there are fears that the demise of the LSC will lead to a multiplicity of quangos and further complications in the market. Fourthly, there are practical concerns about diplomas and the relationships to other legislation. The stories about building trade students not being allowed on to building sites until the age of 16 for health and safety reasons are not apocryphal. Training should not be theoretical in these circumstances; it should be practically based and experienced on site.
	A number of hon. Members have mentioned the need for more apprenticeships. There is huge enthusiasm for apprenticeships, and it runs very wide. My own county council, of which I am still a member, has some 50 apprentices in fields from social care to civil engineering. Large companies in the area are enthusiastic about apprenticeships, but so too are local small and medium-sized businesses. When I recently visited Henley college, which provides training in these areas, people were effusive in their praise for the commitment of small and medium-sized enterprises to training and employment, not only in providing apprenticeships but beyond apprenticeships. I urge the Government to consider introducing further flexibility in this context.

Paul Rowen: Does the hon. Gentleman agree that a barrier to that flexibility is fixed start dates built around academic terms? Many employers need flexibility as to when apprenticeships can start.

John Howell: The hon. Gentleman is right. Businesses do not work to a set timetable, and the barriers that inhibit apprenticeships must be driven out of the system.
	I urge the Government to think about introducing further flexibility in the skills arena and to reassure us that in doing so they will take into account the importance of competitiveness in how these programmes are run.

Tony McNulty: I apologise for not intervening on the hon. Member for Henley (John Howell). I felt for a while that that was obligatory, so I am sorry that I was not quick enough to do so.
	I thank the hon. Member for Hertsmere (Mr. Clappison) for welcoming me to my new position. I look forward to working with him and his team, in between being Minister for employment and Minister for London. I know him to be a gentleman and someone who is very studious in whatever brief he has. I also look forward to working with the hon. Member for Rochdale (Paul Rowen).
	I would take three key words from this debate: practicability, simplicity and flexibility. Those three aspects underline much of what has been said in all the perfectly fair contributions. It is important to return to my little faux pas about my hon. Friend the Member for Stevenage (Barbara Follett), because my hon. Friend the Member for Luton, North (Kelvin Hopkins) is both right and wrong. Yes, of course, given the public funding and the need for money to go where we can exact the best return, we must concentrate on areas where the lack of skills is at its greatest. However, I do not accept that areas such as Henley, which we have just heard about, can almost be left alone. The regional contribution of each and every area, whatever its starting base, is hugely important for our economy.
	Wherever we are going in the current economic downturn, its impact could be desperately disparate and different in various areas, and the relativity of its impact could be very important. For example, on the latest figures, the most significant increases in the claimant count were in the south-east and south-west, albeit from a low base relative to other areas—but that does not mean that we should not be doing all that we can, as flexibly as we can, for the south-east and the south-west. The lowest increase was in London—5 per cent. as opposed to about 30 per cent. in the south-east and south-west—but we know that there is a huge quantum of unemployed in London because of the nature of its labour market. The National Economic Council, the regional economic structures and the Council of Regional Ministers should be pushing back up to the national level the immediate concerns and fine-grained nuances of each and every labour market in terms of jobs lost, vacancies and skills shortages. Those points were well made, and I will try to ensure that that occurs.
	As the hon. Member for Henley said, that granularity in getting closer to what is going on in localised labour markets will be one result of moving down from the Learning and Skills Council to local strategic partnerships. What local employment partnerships have done, where they have been successful—nearly 50,000 jobs have been secured through that process—is another aspect of his point about having fine-tuning and sensitivity to what is occurring in local labour markets. That needs to happen at any time, but in a period of downturn, significant or otherwise, it needs to happen all the more. I also take his points about practicality and about having greater flexibility in matters such as Train to Gain.
	In response to the hon. Member for Rochdale, I point out that the announcement on the £350 million was made yesterday, principally in the other place, but my hon. Friend the Economic Secretary to the Treasury spent an hour here elaborating on it. If the hon. Gentleman reads  Hansard and still needs greater detail, I will happily provide it for him. This is partly to do with a sharper focus on getting from level 2 to level 3 as well as other refocusing in terms of Train to Gain. More details on how to achieve that will be elaborated on in the coming weeks.
	I do not take so seriously the comments that were rather cavalier with recent history. For the record, since 1997 long-term claimant unemployment has fallen by more than three quarters and is close to its lowest level for 30 years. Let us have the debate about nuances and trends, but not by undermining what has gone before. It is easy to assert that there are more unemployed 16 to 24-year-olds now than in 1997, but youth claimant unemployment has fallen by a quarter and long-term, and six-month-plus youth unemployment has fallen by over three quarters.
	I accept that what is very important, as the hon. Member for Hertsmere said, is not necessarily the claimant count, nor even the International Labour Organisation figures, but the number of people who remain in a workless state or entirely economically inactive. We are trying to address those individuals, not least by introducing the employment and support allowance on Monday, enabling us to go through the various incapacity benefits available to individuals to replace them with one allowance, for precisely the reasons the hon. Gentleman suggests, so that no one is left behind. Those in that category who do want to work—I fully accept that there are plenty, some of whom we are not getting to as rigorously as we should—should be helped in that fashion. That will aid with regard to simplicity, as well.

Paul Rowen: The Minister was making a point about flexibility, which I think is important. Six months ago, I encountered a case in which someone wanted to train to be a driving instructor. There was a cost for the relevant course, but Jobcentre Plus said that he was not eligible. I hope that we will look at the criteria that are used, because that course would have got him a job, but he was not eligible. Will the Minister look into such cases?

Tony McNulty: If the hon. Gentleman wants to write to me about the specifics, I will certainly have a look, but he will know that the Green Paper contains proposals to increase the flexibility of job centre personnel advisers, allowing them to take better account of the specific needs of each and every customer early in the process. I take his broader point about things being done as early as possible.
	There are some pilots under way that deal with hon. Members' suggestions about bringing employment and skills together more readily. We are looking at developing further all aspects of the integrated employment and skills service for people including skills screening—I almost said silk screening; that is obviously a subset of skills screening—for new claimants, skills health checks and skills accounts, and hopefully we will be able to implement those further to bring the needs of individuals and employers and that backdrop of analysis of a local area together far more readily. Whatever the shortages, even in areas as relatively affluent as Henley, the industries described by the hon. Member for Henley are important, and we need them to be performing as expertly as possible, and with as much capacity as possible, for the wider economy.

Kelvin Hopkins: One of the points made by the hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) concerned larger employers sustaining apprenticeships. I want to reinforce the point I made about small employers and the difficulty they have in sustaining apprenticeships. Will the Minister take back to his colleagues my suggestion that we ought to look again at a training levy system to help to subsidise smaller employers to retain and sustain apprenticeships for the future?

Tony McNulty: I shall certainly take that back, but I am sure that my hon. Friend knows the answer as well as I do. The broader point about sustainability has been well made, and it was a theme of our debate. Getting people back into work in a sustainable fashion is better than having a sort of merry-go-round, and being able to sustain apprentices in the small business sector is central to the experience and reward that individuals can get out of the process.
	That is why much of the £350 million refocus will be on the small and medium sector, as everyone knows. We are trying to concentrate on small businesses—a sector that may suffer more from the lack of skills and lack of speed in reskilling the local labour market. By doing that alongside the other fiscal things we are doing, we will try to sustain those small businesses. Much of the Government's focus over coming weeks and months will be all that I have described regarding the route from unemployment back into employment, but it will also be about wider fiscal interventions to ensure that jobs do not go in the first place, which is very much part of the equation.
	I take seriously the point of the hon. Member for Hertsmere about worklessness and lack of economic activity. We take seriously the focus on small businesses, and the point about being as local as possible, using intelligence and understanding the nuances in regional and sub-regional labour markets. That all relates to the point I made in my opening remarks about geographical and sectoral concentration of jobs and skills. As with the wider fiscal picture, in this area of all areas, within the context of the progress made thus far in periods of relative prosperity, as the hon. Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald) said, we had better make sure that there is a flexibility to the new deal and everything else that the Jobcentre Plus network offers in periods of less than clement weather, if I can use that phrase. That will be the test. I sincerely think, based on what I have known as a constituency MP and as a Minister, that the Jobcentre Plus network is up to that test, as is the wider system, if the points about simplicity, local focus, flexibility and practicality are allowed to permeate the system during a period of economic downturn.

Oliver Heald: Does the Minister accept that the changed circumstances we are seeing are a bit of a shock to the system? It was not expected that we would necessarily be going into recession at this time. A lot of the plans for job centres are based on the idea that things were going to be ticking along as normal and that it would be possible to cut out waste and so on, and to have a little less capacity. Does he accept that we might need more capacity, not less?

Tony McNulty: I simply do not accept that characterisation. I repeat that job centres have the flexibility and contingency to meet whatever is coming in the weeks and months to come.
	I commend everyone for their contributions and thank the House for the debate.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	 Resolved,
	That the House has considered the matter of work and skills.

Public Accounts

Edward Leigh: I beg to move,
	That this House takes note of the 5th, the 8th, the 14th to the 29th, the 31st to the 35th, the 37th, the 38th, the 42nd and the 50th Reports and the 1st and 2nd Special Reports of the Committee of Public Accounts of Session 2007-08, and of the Treasury Minutes on these Reports (Cm 7366 and 7453).
	It is a pleasure to open the second debate in a little over five months on the work of the Public Accounts Committee. Since our last debate, the Government have managed to achieve the impossible through the incredible, with their lifeline to the banks. The impossible achievement has been to dwarf the scale of public money encompassed by the reports in today's motion. In this debate last year, I was able to recite in a single sentence a list of public spending projects amounting to more than £60 billion. In the last month, some £500 billion has been pledged in an attempt to crack the ice covering our frozen financial system. Incredibly, the word "nationalisation" has re-entered the Government lexicon as the taxpayer now seems likely to own substantial swathes of our once mighty mortgage providers.
	I am sure that Members will agree that there can have been no clearer signal that something was really up than the news that a crack team from Her Majesty's Treasury was descending on Reykjavik. For the sake of those of our constituents whose savings are locked in Icelandic banks, including £7 million from West Lindsey district council, I can only hope it was not the same Treasury team who took four months to produce the Government's response to our tax credits report.
	Of course, the sobering events of recent weeks are not the subject of today's motion. However, the House may be interested to know that I have spoken with the Comptroller and Auditor General about the audit of the £37 billion that the Government are injecting into the banks, which is supported by the recapitalisation scheme. He is proposing to examine whether the Treasury has been able to secure compliance with the specific commitments that the banks are making to maintain lending to homeowners and small businesses; to help people stay in their homes; and to meet the criteria that the Treasury has laid down for senior executive remuneration. He will consider those matters. Alongside those issues, he will want to consider whether the wider strategic interest in strengthening the business performance of the banks has been met, thus also protecting the value of the taxpayer's investment. The Comptroller and Auditor General is expecting to report once we have seen sufficient evidence of the Treasury's progress towards those important objectives. No doubt, our Committee will wish to keep the implications for taxpayers under careful review following any National Audit Office report.
	Personally, I perceive genuine risks in any prolonged Government holding in the banking sector, however necessary those holdings may have become in the current financial crisis. The temptation, as with the former nationalised industries, will be to impose extraneous requirements of pay, employment, backing winners and artificial lending priorities, which will hinder rather than help the banks' return to financial health. In the main news on Sunday night, there was already talk about the fact that we—the public—own the banks and that they must therefore take a more public-spirited view when people fall behind with their mortgage payments. That is fair enough, but let us remember that the investments are taxpayer funded, and that the taxpayer is entitled to expect enhanced value, realised through an early return to the private sector. I am sure that that is the Treasury's view, too.
	The glacial storm that is creeping over the economy should give all Members who consider the Committee's reports cause for cold, hard reflection. As economic prospects hardened a year ago, the comprehensive spending review stemmed the flood of gold that had previously rushed in—and out—of spending Departments. Now, with the flow of taxpayers' funds diverted to the City, and the onset of an economic winter of uncertain harshness and duration, the constraints on Departments are likely to be tighter still.
	In our previous debate on the matter, I noted that the narrowed ideological gap between the major political parties placed the efficient delivery of public services—and hence our Committee's work—at the heart of the political debate. That is even more true today, for a moral imperative now embraces that political importance. Taxpayers facing difficult times have no more to give. Citizens in need will rely on public services to help them through in difficult times. A Government who rely on borrowing can afford no costly public expenditure failures. The duty of all public servants is therefore clear, vital and personal. It is to stretch every pound and squander none. That is where our Committee comes into the debate.
	The Committee's reports offer prescriptions from which, I believe, public servants can learn, and I want to emphasise today three themes that have a wider resonance. Sound financial management is paramount, reducing internal costs is essential and—perhaps most important and pertinent—understanding risk is critical if projects are to end on the right side of the dividing line between successful delivery and disaster.
	Departments need to display strong financial management if they are to withstand the slings and arrows of changing economic conditions and deliver cost-effective public services. They need the requisite finance skills, commercial acumen, the right information and leaders who emphasise that money matters. I welcome the increasing priority that is given to professional finance skills. We are delighted to say—because it reflects a long-running campaign by the Committee—that all but two major Departments now have a professionally qualified finance director. Those appointments have brought new focus to financial management in Departments.
	However, individuals cannot do it alone. Many permanent secretaries are the accounting officers who appear before our Committee, yet they have not a single financial qualification between them. They are not automatically held to account in the civil service for their management of resources. It cannot, therefore, be a surprise that so much remains to be done to embed in Departments a culture that money matters. A worrying lack of financial skills and awareness remains among non-finance staff. Budgetary control is hampered by inaccurate forecasting, and the quality of financial information needs significant improvement. If Departments cannot understand the cost of a service, the public can have little confidence that the service offers value for money.
	To support better financial management, the National Audit Office has embarked on a series of reports that examine each Department's financial management. For example, in the past two years, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has budgeted to spend more than its Treasury funding limits. As the risk of overspending became clear, it had to make cuts, but there are also things to welcome. DEFRA has established more rigorous financial systems and this year's accounts were delivered much earlier.
	Our system of public financial management relies on transparency and clear oversight. Unfortunately, the Ministry of Defence tried to persuade us that the forecast costs of major defence equipment projects were under control by moving £1 billion to other defence budgets. Anyone with a passing familiarity with recent events understands that masking true cost is wrong and dangerous. I hope that the approach was unconnected to the fact that, despite initiative after initiative, lasting improvements in the delivery of vital equipment to our servicemen and women have yet to be achieved. Such creative reporting is the enemy of sound financial management and I do not believe that the Committee would want it repeated.
	The Committee was also critical of aspects of the Ministry of Defence privatisation of QinetiQ. We recognise that the privatisation successfully protected the viability of that strategically important business and that the Ministry of Defence ran the 2006 flotation well. However, the NAO estimated that an extra £90 million could have been raised from the initial 2003 privatisation. Despite the Department's protestations, it is clear that the sale went ahead at the worst possible time and that the Ministry of Defence weakened competition by eliminating bidders too early.
	We were strong, too, in our condemnation of the conflicts of interest affecting QinetiQ's senior management, which the Ministry of Defence failed to manage during the sale process. Public servants should not be negotiating their own incentive schemes with a preferred bidder. The result of the privatisation was a clear disparity in rewards, which the Committee found scarcely credible: while the taxpayer received £9 for every pound invested, QinetiQ's senior management received an extraordinary £200.
	Let us examine reducing internal costs. We all consider precious every additional pound that can be devoted to the front line and that does not have to come from increased taxes or raised borrowing. A year ago, the Government accompanied ambitious new efficiency targets with plans to sell £30 billion of surplus assets by 2010-11. The Committee had to express scepticism over claimed efficiency gains in the past, so I welcome the news that the NAO will audit those savings on a Department-by-Department basis. However, setting savings targets is easier than delivering results. Accounting officers should cut waste, reduce complexity and seek economies in some obvious areas.
	Property should be an immediate target. That is elementary stuff. The Government are almost 40 per cent. worse than the private sector benchmark for using office space, with a potential saving of more than £320 million a year. I am pleased that the Office of Government Commerce has the ambition to seek savings of £1 billion a year, but it will need to do better than its performance against the two key milestones already missed. I trust that the Exchequer Secretary will look to her own house—or her own office block—given the Treasury's parlous position at the bottom of the league for efficient use of space.
	Another unrealised area for savings is using shared services. The Committee had strong doubts about the information on which the Cabinet Office's target of £1.4 billion savings is based. Indeed, those Members present at the hearing will recall that the Cabinet Office had lost the calculations and the underlying data involved in its estimate.
	Reducing complexity in processes is another requirement for an efficient public sector. Nowhere is the financial impact of complexity felt more strongly than in the Department for Work and Pensions; nowhere, that is, except for Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs.
	Benefit fraud and error continue to be a major drain on taxpayers, with £2.7 billion lost last year. I recognise the progress in reducing reported benefit fraud, but for customer and official error to have nearly doubled in the past five years to almost £2 billion suggests that our benefits system is not merely complex, but risks becoming unmanageable. We have said time and again that, if we are to get a grip on fraud and error, we must reduce complexity in the benefits system.
	Meanwhile, our latest look at tax credits showed the highest rates of error and fraud in central Government. The annual amount may have reduced somewhat, but £4.3 billion remained to be recovered from claimants. In our hearing, we expressed doubt about how much—if any—will be recovered. Nearly £2 billion at least is in doubt. That level of error led the Comptroller and Auditor General to qualify his opinion on the HMRC trust statement for the sixth year running. Despite some improvements to the scheme, it is still not efficiently run. Everyone—claimant and taxpayer—has been let down. Let us hope that the pressure on families to pay back money that they have already spent does not make the coming economic winter coldest for those who can least afford it.
	I come now to risk management. Sound financial management and reducing unnecessary administration are bedrocks to build on, as we have said again and again. It is the failure to manage risk that causes many project costs to soar and delivery to fail. The public sector must never be afraid to innovate or to take well managed risks. We never stand in the way of Departments doing that. Constant innovation is as essential to public sector success as it is to private sector success, but the consequences of inappropriate innovation and misunderstood risk have never been so powerfully obvious.
	If there has, as yet, been no public sector equivalent of the weapons of mass financial destruction that have unleashed such devastation elsewhere, there remain too many examples for comfort of inadequate risk management in public sector projects. Government borrowing is at its highest for 60 years, so a sober look is surely needed at the risks of each new private finance initiative deal racking up debts for schools and hospitals. Those vital public services must remain both financially stable and operationally flexible. Knowledge and good health are too precious to put at risk.
	Only this Tuesday, the London news programmes reported on how NHS trusts in London are now facing severe difficulties with their PFI projects for new hospitals. In conference after conference and in parliamentary questions I have queried the level of debt that the PFI is building up for our children and grandchildren. I have been constantly reassured by the Treasury and, indeed, by the National Audit Office that everything is fine. Listening to those London news reports about the increasing difficulty of London NHS trusts, however, I began to wonder whether my warnings had in fact been pertinent. Many others are worried about the level of debt building up through PFI projects.
	We saw inadequacies in risk management in the Foreign Office's approach to our liability for the 14 overseas territories; in our update report on the single payment scheme, which is still causing problems for farmers; and in the BBC. Perhaps it would help the corporation if the NAO were given full access to the books. We say that as often as the BBC repeats its programmes, so perhaps there is no point in going on saying it.
	Failures to anticipate and manage risk were encapsulated in our report on the Bicester asylum accommodation project. Almost £30 million was spent without delivering any benefit to the taxpayer or in any way furthering asylum policy. It was a controversial project, yet the Home Office did not recognise the serious risk of planning delay. Nor did it give explicit recognition to its own changes to the asylum system—a classic case of the right and left hands expressing surprise at meeting each other in the same place.
	Let us hope that those in charge of a considerably larger project—the 2012 Olympics, which has been in the news again this week—proceed with a greater appreciation of the risks and a higher level of competence. I am sure that all Members present would like to congratulate our sportsmen and women in Beijing on their excellent performance. They finished fourth in the Olympic medal table and second in the Paralympic table four years ago. I was particularly pleased that our sailors who practise my own sport proved more successful than me in my recent damp experience in the Solent, where I managed to overturn my dinghy in a dead calm—perhaps an allegory for some of our political careers.
	Applying lessons to the Olympics from the management of risk in other public sector projects does not give one a wholehearted sense of comfort. There should be realistic assumptions about likely costs and realisable benefits. The estimate of the 2012 budget at the time of the bid—at just over £4 billion, although originally it was £2 billion—was clearly unrealistic in ignoring major factors such as contingency provision, tax obligations, policing and wider requirements.
	The budget has now mushroomed to £9.3 billion, while over-optimistic estimates of private sector funding have been scaled down from £738 million to £165 million today. Watch this space, as I am sure there might well be further reductions. With a revised budget, one could say that that is water under the bridge. My Committee welcomes the fact that the programme is broadly on track, but arrangements to manage the whole programme are not yet in place. We must guard against pressure to change venues and infrastructure and we must be quite clear about the costs and consequences of any such changes.
	Another lesson is that unquantifiable benefits should be made clear, yet the Government's target for 2 million more people to participate in a sport or physical activity by 2012 is based on no conclusive proof that winning Olympic or Paralympic medals influences levels of participation in the community. We must not get too dazzled by the gold medals in Beijing. The PAC is not a tabloid; it is not bedazzled by gold medals, but works in the interest of the taxpayer. Instead, we need to see a plan for using sporting success at the games to improve levels of participation.
	It is also important to have contingencies if matters take an unexpected course. To support medal goals, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport hopes to raise about £100 million from the private sector. Perhaps the Minister can confirm today that there is still a realistic chance of raising that money, as we warned back in 2006 of the risks of leaving it too late.
	There must be a contingency plan for protecting the funds of the sports most likely to win medals in 2012, and the total final cost depends on proceeds arising from the disposal of assets such as the Olympic village after the games. In today's climate, that looks increasingly uncertain. Given these uncertainties, potential demands on the £1 billion of contingency funds that have not yet been earmarked will need very careful monitoring.
	Of course, no risk to any project can be effectively managed without accurate evidence. Departments are responsible for ensuring that Members of Parliament are not misled, even inadvertently, by the evidence they provide. We were therefore very concerned that the Department for Transport gave the Committee unreliable information on the rate of evasion of vehicle excise duty. We produced our report, drawing on its figure that the rate of evasion of duty by motorcyclists was 38 per cent. Yet shortly afterwards, new statistics for evasion, based on a new methodology, put the figure at 9.8 per cent. We expect Departments to be accurate; if they are not sure whether their figures are reliable, they should say so and, if necessary, apologise for any mistakes, as I did.
	In conclusion, the Public Accounts Committee operates from the sound base provided by Tim Burr and the staff of the National Audit Office, who have our grateful thanks, as without them we could do nothing. I am also grateful to the Government for welcoming the Public Accounts Commission's proposals to enhance the NAO's governance. The commission has spent a lot of time on that and I think that it has it right. I look forward to the inclusion of the necessary legislative changes in the Constitutional Renewal Bill in the near future. In the meantime, I am pleased to say that the wheels are in motion to find a permanent successor to Mr. Burr.
	As ever, we are ably assisted by Mark Etherton and the staff of the Committee office. I also pay tribute, of course, to my fellow Committee members, who continue to work hard to hold the Government to account, irrespective of party or politics. Week in and week out, the Committee gives meaning to the spirit expressed by Benjamin Disraeli that
	"all power is a trust; and we are accountable for its exercise."
	It is a spirit that some appearing before us find disconcerting, but it has never been of greater value than in the current cold climate.
	Citizens' interest in the earnings that they pass over to the Government does not end at the point of taxation. Those spending public money are exercising a trust on behalf of the public, and parliamentary accountability is the embodiment of that trust. The Committee provides a guarantee to the public that their interest is not left unrepresented. We do so in times of both prosperity and adversity. Our duty is unaffected by economic fortunes, and public servants' duties to Parliament remain unaltered. Trying times may call for tough messages. The House and the public can, I believe, be assured that our Committee will not shrink from that task. I commend the motion to the House.

Don Touhig: It is a great privilege and pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh). As Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, he does an excellent job, and he has just given the House a powerful and in-depth appreciation of our work. We have spent many hours covering the issues that he has managed to cover in about 20-odd minutes. For that, we are in his debt.
	I begin by paying tribute to the staff who assist members of the Public Accounts Committee. It is because of their hard work and professionalism in support of its members that the PAC is held in such high regard—and, of course, without the hard work and initiative of the Comptroller and Auditor General and the support of the National Audit Office, it would not be half as effective as it is. Without the National Audit Office, Parliament and our democracy would be the less, Governments would not be held to account, and public spending would lack the in-depth scrutiny that we are able to give it. Britain's National Audit Office is, I believe, the envy of parliamentarians around the world.
	The PAC is not simply an important cog in the wheel of Parliament; I consider it to be the very heart of the mechanism by which the people, through their elected representatives, hold the Government to account for public expenditure. The broad range of subjects that we investigate and the wide-ranging nature of our inquiries ensure that all Government Departments are open to examination. Echoing the words of our Chairman, the hon. Member for Gainsborough, I wish that the BBC—although it is not a Government Department—were part of that scrutiny. It is quite wrong, in my view, that a body that spends billions of pounds of public money is not open to the same scrutiny as any Government Department. It is the first to broadcast the news if anything goes wrong with any Department, while closing its own doors to detailed public scrutiny.
	There can be little doubt that there is no hiding place when witnesses come before the Committee. We tend to give them a hard time. My hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell), who is present, has described the Committee's work as a blood sport, and perhaps some of those who come before us have the same impression when they walk out of the door after a session of one and a half or two hours.
	Let me take this opportunity to talk about some of the lessons that I have learned during my time as a member of the Committee. I suppose it is ironic, in one sense, that I should use the phrase "lessons learned" when it has become abundantly clear to me that many Departments are incapable of learning lessons as a result of projects that go wrong. The two overriding impressions with which I am left after each session of the PAC are that when a project goes wrong no one takes responsibility, and that—perhaps more important—it rarely seems to occur to Departments to conduct a "lessons learned" exercise when a project goes wrong, or indeed right.
	At the time of the recent review of the accounts of Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, the Comptroller and Auditor General issued a qualified opinion on the regularity of tax credits because of the high levels of error and fraud. I believe that the hon. Member for Gainsborough said that this was the sixth successive year in which a qualified opinion had been issued, and there is still very little evidence that the problems with the system are coming under control. Six years on, the situation remains the same: £1 billion was overpaid in 2006-07, and £4.3 billion remains to be recovered from claimants, some of it because of error and some because of fraud.
	Time and again, the complexity of applying for tax credits and the lack of clarity in the information that is provided when someone submits a claim have been cited as major causes of the difficulties with the system. Indeed, the Committee's fifth report on tax credits states that many claimants struggle to understand them, and cannot understand why they have been overpaid either. There have been many complaints about the process for recovering overpayments, and the ombudsman continues to receive, and uphold, a large number of them; but only now is HMRC giving people support to help them to make their claims and avoid such problems. It is a little too late for families who may wish that they had never become involved in the tax credit system in the first place—which is a great pity, because it has made a huge difference and benefited a great many families in our country.
	Given those problems with HMRC and tax credits, we have to ask, "Where are the lessons learned?" I am convinced that the failure to learn lessons led to the outrageous situation in 2005 involving the European Union single payment scheme for farmers. The cost of implementing the scheme was budgeted at £76 million, but in March 2006 it had reached £122 million. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Rural Payments Agency had expected to reduce the agency's staff by 1,800 and to make efficiency savings of £164 million by 2008-09, but difficulties in processing claims led to the recruitment of additional staff, and the scheme's implementation has now cost £46 million more than the budget.
	When I sit in the House or in Committee, I sometimes reflect on my time as a Defence Minister, when I struggled to find money to improve the accommodation of our servicemen and women and their families—which was often in the news—and on what I could have done with a fraction of that £46 million.
	In my constituency, Friends of Newbridge Memo are seeking to restore a wonderful building which was built after the first world war. Miners and their families paid a penny a week to provide that facility for the community, with a library, a ballroom and meeting rooms. The Celynen Collieries band practises there, and indeed was founded there. The building was erected in memory of the boys from Newbridge who went to the great war and did not come back. It was runner-up in the BBC's "Restoration Village" competition. Friends of Newbridge Memo need £4.9 million to begin putting the building back into shape. Their application to the Heritage Lottery Fund was turned down, and I am sure that they would have welcomed just a small portion of the £46 million by which the Rural Payments Agency has gone over budget.
	My area also desperately needs a rail link from the Ebbw valley to Newport. The line currently goes to Cardiff. It will be completed eventually, but it could be completed next year with a fraction of the money that is being wasted on projects like that. Cancercareline in my constituency provides wonderful support, mainly for women suffering from cancer. Home-Start helps families who are struggling with the difficulties of bringing up young children. The money that is being wasted here could provide them with funding for decades, so that they could do more wonderful work in the community. That makes me very angry and frustrated.
	It gets worse. According to the latest report, the agency has estimated that there were overpayments for the single payment scheme amounting to more than £20 million in 2005 and £17 million in 2006, and it has still not resolved the problem of how to get the money back.
	The most extraordinary aspect of all this is that no one takes responsibility for what happens. The culture has to change. The hon. Member for Gainsborough referred to the present economic situation. Nowadays, even bankers cannot be certain that their gold-plated jobs, massive salaries and generous bonuses will continue if things go wrong. Why, then, should those who are responsible for the failure to deliver public services that are vital to our constituents be immune from the consequences of failure?

Richard Bacon: I agree with the right hon. Gentleman about the BBC's "Restoration Village" programme. Pulham St Mary, the village in Norfolk where I live, made it to the last 12. I am pleased to say that it has just received a lottery grant.
	As for the Rural Payments Agency, one person did take responsibility. When Johnston McNeill finally appeared before the Committee, he gave a surprisingly good account of what he had done. However, we gained the clear impression that, as chief executive, he had not only taken the rap but been hung out to dry, and that others in DEFRA and the agency, far from taking responsibility for what had happened, got away scot-free and prospered elsewhere.

Don Touhig: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for reminding me about that session. That gentleman did come before us. He was very frank, and he did take responsibility. I agree that he was hung out to dry, and I think that the heads of many others should have been on the chopping block for the awful waste in the agency.
	The reason for many of the problems and failures in managing complex projects comes down to the fact that many civil servants are ill-prepared to run the commercial-type projects their Departments are now engaged in. Central Government now manage more financial resources than ever before, and according to a National Audit Office report published in February that sum will grow to £678 billion a year by 2010-11. That report also stated that six Departments, accounting for more than £45 billion of Government expenditure, still did not have a professionally qualified finance director on their main board. The Chairman, the hon. Member for Gainsborough, has updated us, and that is now down to two Departments, so some progress has been made. However, it is almost unbelievable that such massive organisations should not have a finance director on their board.
	The report highlighted the difficulties and dangers of not having properly qualified staff. Almost 70 per cent. of Departments cited the level of skills of non-finance staff as one of the three most significant barriers to improving financial resource management across Government. One has to wonder whether this may be the reason why there have been so many commercial blunders. The Home Office spent £29.1 million planning and designing the purpose-built accommodation centre for asylum seekers at Bicester, only for it to be cancelled. The enormous problems delivering the national programme for IT in the NHS, which will cost £12.7 billion, arose because officials did not actually understand the limitations of the technology. This is basic stuff for those involved in such massive undertakings.
	For all these mistakes and such waste of public money, there seems to me to be no real incentive to get things right first time. No one is ultimately responsible for any decision. Ministers may come and go and civil servants may move on, and the ownership of a project can change hands several times. Therefore, the NAO and the Public Accounts Committee will frequently only provide objective scrutiny of a project years after it started, when it is too late to influence the final outcomes.
	I referred at the beginning of my speech to the lessons that I have learned while serving on the Committee. Perhaps the biggest challenge is that Departments must be far better at monitoring how projects are managed. They need regular reports on how major projects are being managed, and internal audits so that we can see what is going wrong and what is going right, and learn lessons from that. Senior staff have to take ownership of major projects and should bear the consequences if they go wrong. In that way, we will begin to reduce this awful waste of taxpayers' money. The hon. Member for Gainsborough said that we must stretch every pound and squander none. I entirely agree. If that happens, perhaps future PAC hearings will be less of a blood sport.

John Pugh: In listening carefully to our revered Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh)—and I always listen to our revered Chairman carefully—I noted that he made at least two important points. First, he laid out the systematic failures of public expenditure programmes. Secondly, he highlighted the huge new task that confronts us—because, after all, we are now in a situation in which public expenditure is ballooning and Government expenditure is encompassing bailing out the whole financial system almost across the globe, and there is also a continued roll-out of private finance initiative projects, which will increasingly be the way in which Government spend money. Tax revenues are, therefore, ever more precious, and effective targeting of public expenditure has never been more important, and waste has never been more unforgivable.
	The Chairman has put forward sensible, important and strategic proposals for Government consideration, and he has done so in a wholly constructive spirit. I think we are a wholly constructive Committee. To be fair, at times the PAC has an attack-dog reputation, as was alluded to in the previous speech; it has a reputation for gratuitously roughing up senior civil servants, and especially those on large bonuses. However, the arrival of the hon. Members for Sedgefield (Phil Wilson) and Edinburgh, South (Nigel Griffiths) and the right hon. Member for Streatham (Keith Hill) has changed that just a tad. We have possibly been a little slower to condemn key Government spending programmes—or, possibly, they have—or the way Governments deploy resources when they embark on spending programmes. However, this is not a battle between critics and defenders of programmes, or between optimists and pessimists, or at least that is not how I see it. Instead, the Committee is essentially evidence-led; we are interacting all the time with a massive resource, the National Audit Office, to which we are deeply indebted.
	I am not going to embark on a Cook's tour of all our reports in the past Session, but I would like to alight on some that have brought back many memories for me, and to highlight those that contain important messages. First, we had a raft of reports on taxation—the evasion of vehicle excise duty and on tax credits and tax form reports. Significantly, they underline how much could be gained through an efficient tax system and how much could be lost through a grossly inefficient system, and therefore what great gain is to be had simply in getting it right.
	One interesting report, although not directly about taxation, was on managing risk in overseas territories. It turned over a stone that covered the vast and murky world of tax avoidance and tax evasion, which is a whole industry in places such as Bermuda, where I think there are about 80 per cent. of all hedge funds. We found that huge amounts of money were being moved around the world by companies that had connections with this country. Surely it is unacceptable that those corporate pirates—the hedge funds—can hide out there, free like the old-time pirates, to create havoc on the financial markets and to account to no one. Surely that must be tackled.
	Another set of reports were about Government efficiency, and we examined Government property. We have recently heard, and moaned, about the culling of tax offices, which has certainly been an issue in my constituency and something about which I have strong views. When surveying it, I felt that we were unable to judge the real gains, and we are unable to do so now as the programme unfolds. I am not sure whether anybody is in a position to judge the real gains in property, because so much has already been leased under commercially confidential private finance initiative arrangements. We simply do not know what those are worth or the result of surrendering the leases.
	We examined the NHS. We will all recall the issue that arose a year or so ago concerning the NHS being overdrawn or in the red. We examined its return to balance and agreed that it was a wholly good thing, and we awarded congratulations where they were due. I must say that I personally baulked at the spectacle of the north-west subsidising London, as it appeared to do according to the accounts that I looked at, and at times I found it hard to distinguish true efficiency gains from creative accountancy or simply the same money being accounted for in different ways.
	Most poignantly, we examined the plight of neonatal babies and the variations in their fortunes across the nation. We all had to accept that that was not directly a function of NHS spending but due to wider intractable problems, public health issues and so on. It is an incredibly difficult problem to tackle but modest progress is being made, and we were all grateful to see that.
	Something that stuck in my mind, and about which I was reminded by the question that the hon. Member for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy (Mr. Llwyd) asked at Prime Minister's questions yesterday, was our report on people leaving the services. We concentrated particularly on the less qualified individual—not the lieutenant but the private, the squaddie leaving the services. It seems to me there is a problem that demands immediate attention but that genuinely can be rectified.
	We established that too many young men who join the infantry, often as a path to personal salvation and often with problems and a relatively deficient educational background, pass through the Army and eventually end up on the streets, sometimes unhoused, usually untrained for civilian life and certainly woefully unprepared. That was vividly illustrated in the hon. Gentleman's question yesterday, when he pointed out that 10 per cent. of the prison population have been through the services. There must surely be something that the Army, the services or somebody can do about that. We cannot let that situation continue. We have to do more for those people when they join, when they serve and when they leave.
	I close my remarks by suggesting where the PAC and the NAO may wish to go next, following the progress that we have made over the past term. Following our inquiry into pathfinders and housing regeneration, there is a genuine need to look into the targeting and efficiency of the whole regeneration budget and the various budgets that constitute regeneration. We have to challenge the assumption that the process is always meritorious and that all the money is well spent. My belief is that much is, in fact, being wasted.
	Following the QinetiQ inquiry, we need to look into the whole issue of remuneration in the higher reaches of the civil service, the bonus culture that has grown almost without our noticing, and the transfer of top people to and from Whitehall and the conflicts that that might involve. Such an inquiry would be deeply unpopular in many circles, but I believe that it has to be done and is long overdue. Also, probably, in the overdue category is the need to remove the bad odour hanging over defence contracting and commissioning with overseas states, including, dare I say it, Saudi Arabia. We perhaps need to take a close look at recent contracts, rather than raking over the past.
	Finally, I turn to a point that we have not dealt with at all in the two previous Sessions. We need to examine public value in our railways: the stewardship of Network Rail, which is a bone of contention in this House; the quasi-monopolies of the rolling stock leasing companies, or ROSCOs; and the Department for Tranport's role in the whole kaleidoscope of interactions that make up the railway system. As thousands of people make their way home tonight, no inquiry could have more resonance with the general public than one into overcrowded trains that cost premium prices.

Richard Bacon: It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Southport (Dr. Pugh), who is a forensic member of the Public Accounts Committee; his contributions are always appreciated by its members, of whichever party.
	I endorse the Chairman of the Committee's comments about public expenditure, and the recent bank recapitalisation, in particular. It is entirely appropriate for the Comptroller and Auditor General to examine the huge sum involved on behalf of taxpayers, and I very much hope that the Treasury agrees with that and will assist the National Audit Office in every way.
	Secondly, I wish to comment on the issue of financial management, which has been to the fore in many of the Committee's reports. When I first starting asking what proportion of principal finance officers—finance directors, as they are now called—in Departments have an accountancy qualification, the answer was 23 per cent. The Treasury recently told us that the answer is now 91 per cent, and although that figure excludes the big exception of the Ministry of Defence's finance director, who is in charge of £32 billion of expenditure, enormous progress has been made. I congratulate the Treasury and other Departments on starting to realise that the topic is important and that they have to do something about it. The progress should not go unremarked; the Treasury has understood the importance of the matter.
	That makes it all the more important for the Treasury to give a sensible account of tax credits, the subject of the Committee's eighth report. It stated that
	"there is little evidence the Department has the scheme"—
	the tax credits scheme—
	"under control. Many claimants continue to struggle to understand tax credits and why they are overpaid. There have been many complaints about the process for recovering overpayments and the Ombudsman continues to receive and to uphold a large number of complaints...This level of error led the C&AG to qualify his opinion on the HMRC Trust Statement for the fifth year running. The Department still has no targets for reducing error and fraud."
	If we think that financial management is important, and if the Treasury thinks it is important enough to ensure that qualified finance directors are in place across Whitehall, surely it is important enough to ensure that the department that comes directly under the Treasury's own control—Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, which has the task of collecting the money that we then spend on various public expenditure programmes—is itself under sufficiently tight financial management that it can account for how it spends its money. At the moment, it is unable to do so—it has not been able to do so for several years. I hope that we will be told when the Treasury expects the Comptroller and Auditor General to be able to sign off HMRC's accounts as clean, because it is only right that what is good for other Departments should be good for the Treasury and its subsidiary departments.
	I wish to make another quick point about tax credits. A settlement was reached between EDS and HMRC concerning the tax credits fiasco. The Treasury originally claimed that EDS should pay it £209 million, but that was later cut to an agreed settlement figure of £71 million. Only about £44 million of that was paid in cash or near cash; the remainder, £26.5 million, was to come from future revenues on contracts that EDS had not yet won with government. In other words, it is to come from future business. Apart from the fact that that gave Government Departments a rather strong incentive to award EDS further business despite, rather than because of, its track record, it has been clear that over the past two and half to three years since the agreement was reached hardly any money has been paid. Most of the £26.5 million is still unpaid; a few hundreds of thousands have been paid and there was one payment of £20,000. The chairman of HMRC for the time being knows that every time he comes before the Committee—unfortunately, I was abroad when he came before us last time, in early October—I shall ask him how much money he has had. He always comes prepared with the answer. Indeed, his distinguished predecessor Paul Gray, who honourably resigned over the issue of the missing discs, said that he would have been most disappointed had the question not been asked. I will continue to ask the question.

John Pugh: I am sorry that the hon. Gentleman missed the last occasion, but the question was asked in one form or another and litigation was threatened by the chief executive of HMRC. I do not think that we believed him, but the hon. Gentleman might be interested in that observation.

Richard Bacon: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who brings me to the point that I was about to make, which is that the various representatives of HMRC have made it very clear that they have been documenting millions of pages of material relating to the case so that they can, if necessary, litigate. But they really ought not to have to. It is in the nature of large-scale computer contracts that they hardly ever go to litigation because, at the end of the day, the only people who win are the lawyers. It is much better to avoid litigation. However, EDS should recognise its responsibilities in this area.
	If one goes to the Vote Office and asks for the PAC bundle, one is given all this material I have beside me. My hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Angela Browning) said that she was rather intimidated by it; after all, it was Fidel Castro who said that any speech of less than four hours cannot be doing any good. I was tempted to be a little more expansive, but the Chairman reminded me that it is impolite to speak for longer than the Chairman himself. He only spoke for 20 minutes, so I will have to restrain myself.
	I wanted to comment briefly on QinetiQ, which seems to have displayed some unwelcome tendencies among civil servants. Lord Gilbert, the former Labour Defence Minister, said on the "Today" programme about Sir John Chisholm, the boss of QinetiQ:
	"Never once in my presence did Sir John Chisholm indicate that he might have a conflict of interest or he was going privately to be enriched by what was going on."
	In the Defence Committee, the hon. Member for Crawley (Laura Moffatt) also quizzed Sir John Chisholm at great length about whether or not there was a financial gain for him and whether he was likely to get shares. The transcript can be seen on page 19 of the evidence. It was absolutely clear that he evaded telling anyone that he was going to benefit financially or through shares. The Chairman of the Defence Committee said:
	"You know what I am getting at. I do not want to see people leaving the Ministry of Defence who have been part of the negotiation... and within 6 months 12 months or so ending up on a tripled salary."
	We know that, for an investment of £130,000, Sir John Chisholm ended up with £25 million of equity in the business. It is probably a bit less than that now, but the principle still applies. No safeguards were put in place. The permanent under-secretary, Bill Jeffrey, made it clear to us that there were no safeguards. The Treasury must revisit the whole issue of QinetiQ and make sure that in any future transactions of that kind, better safeguards are put in place. Many of our constituents are very angry about it and many parliamentary colleagues were very angry about the fact that such a transaction was allowed to occur.
	I wanted briefly to mention the progress on the Rural Payments Agency, which the right hon. Member for Islwyn (Mr. Touhig) mentioned. Johnston McNeill, the chief executive of the agency, came before us and I was quite impressed by his evidence. He gave quite a good account of himself. I have read in detail the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee report on the whole fiasco and he did have a lot of responsibility. But it is also clear that that should have been shared more widely.
	I find it extraordinary that an agency with the title of the Rural Payments Agency had the job of making payments but was unable to tell farmers either the date when they would get their payments or how much they had already been paid. I once worked out the number of payments per employee of the agency, and I think that it was 29. The employees could have been sent out to the farms, with a day for travel there, a day on the farm and a day for travel back, and the whole thing could still have been done and dusted in three months if the payments had been made by personal visit and manually. If people phone their banks, they can find out if they have received a payment and for how much, but that so-called payments agency was unable to provide those figures, which speaks eloquently of the scale of its failure.
	I hope that the Treasury studies the reports from the PAC and the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee and tries to learn the lessons. I agree with the right hon. Member for Islwyn that not enough effort is always made to learn the lessons, and that must change.
	There is a hopeful straw in the wind, because the Treasury has appointed Mr. Martin Read, the former boss of Logica, to try to teach it how to run IT projects and to jettison them as quickly as possible when it becomes apparent that they have gone wrong, again. There was a tremendous headline in a story in an online magazine about the appointment, although it may not be entirely parliamentary:
	"Ex-Logica boss to teach UK.gov how to identify crap IT".
	The project apparently involves Mr. Read looking at how to keep
	"dedicated teams on projects from start to finish"
	and at
	"not being afraid to abandon a project just because it's high profile".
	However, the article points out:
	"Both those aims would run totally counter to the traditional...way of doing things. The very essence of politics and public sector work is to never finish a project and to get out while the going's good. And because no one has a start to finish view of a particular project, no-one can really see how crippled it is, so the chances of anyone sticking their neck on the line and saying it should be pulled are next to zero."
	I hope that that is too cynical a view and that Mr. Read's work will yield some benefits. The fact that he was forced out of Logica after a profit warning following a European buying spree in 2007—so that he presumably bought the companies involved at the top of the market—causes me some concern, but I wish him well.
	My final remarks concern the national programme for IT in the health service. We do not have a report on that before us, although it is a long-term project that has been running for some six years, and is therefore now six years late. Two years ago it had been running for four years and was four years late, so little change there. There has been a development since we last had a chance to discuss it—the withdrawal of one of the major contractors, Fujitsu. Baroness Thornton described its departure in the other place as "a sign of strength", which is an interesting way to put it. Essentially, Fujitsu was prepared to fulfil the terms of its contract, but the Government have said that they would rather keep the project money than have that happen, thus risking a £700 million lawsuit, which—according to the press—Fujitsu is now threatening. And that is a sign of strength, apparently. It reminds me of Tom Lehrer's comment when Henry Kissinger received the Nobel peace prize that it was the end of satire. If that is a sign of strength, what would be a sign of weakness?

John Howell: I shall begin by offering my thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh) and members of his Committee for the work that they do. I shall pick up on two reports, the first of which relates to shared services. That is an area in which I have some practical responsibility, in that I had political responsibility for delivering a shared services centre in a large local authority. As I am a committed decentraliser, the centralisation inherent within shared services was something of a bitter pill to swallow, but the potential from shared services is so enormous that it is difficult to ignore.
	I would like some reassurance on the models for shared services centres. They have become much more sophisticated, so they are no longer about the centralisation of everything in one place but about a number of different shared services that can work in parallel, supporting each other in partnerships or through federated solutions that deliver more of the benefits without creating the centralised monster that these things can become.
	My experience has been positive and has delivered a high degree of success, with considerable savings. Let us be clear about those savings, however. They come from removing people from the pay roll where there is considerable duplication in areas such as finance and human resources. If shared services come with considerable savings, they also come with considerable cost. Success can be measured in a number of ways, not just in cost savings. This is a chance to avoid and remove duplication and to simplify processes, but, most of all, the implementation of shared services, if delivered in the right way, can be a fundamental tool in achieving culture change within an organisation and sweeping away a wasteful and bureaucratic culture.
	I would be interested to hear comments on a few lessons that I took on board from my experience. First, the key to success is to have not only a strong business case but a superb level of detail up front in the implementation plan. It is not just about the practicalities of buildings and technology. Any organisation will find that multi-tasking means that bits of jobs are here and there. It is not unusual for somebody in finance, for example, to spend 40 per cent. of their time on finance and 60 per cent. of their time on something else. That is quite difficult to accommodate within the concept and model of a shared services centre, but unless that is done, the opportunity is missed not only to centralise the 40 per cent. that is devoted to the finance function but to challenge the viability of the remaining 60 per cent.
	Secondly, it is absolutely essential to have a clear timeline, detailed financial information and an idea of exactly where the savings will come from. My experience is that that will change as the project advances, but unless one knows where one is at the start—or at least where one wants to be—it all ends up in an awful mess. I understand that a number of attempts at setting up shared service centres have already fallen foul of that. It is right to insist on detailed project plans and to measure progress frequently.
	Thirdly, it is important not to be too ambitious. Most Government Departments could do with setting up a shared service centre just for that Department first, before the Government try to take an interdepartmental approach. If they try to extend too quickly, that will lead to problems because of the differences in culture—even fairly small ones—between different Departments. In the case of the shared services centre that I set up for my county council, for example, we refused from the beginning to follow the Government's advice to try to do it in one go by bringing in district councils, the police authority and whatever else. The differences in culture would have meant that that would have been too difficult and would have upset the financial business case. I would have been happy to consider doing that in the future, and I hope that those still involved in the project would be happy to do so, but it has to be done incrementally, so that people can be absolutely sure of the costs and the savings that arise.
	Fourthly, the project cannot be divorced from a hearts-and-minds initiative. As I mentioned earlier, this is about major cultural change. In my experience, one of the biggest bits of cultural change was driving home the idea of the internal customer and of the needs of that customer. There are huge penalties and risks of failure if that point is not taken on board, and the IT requirements got right, from day one.
	My fifth point is that is essential to have a separate governance structure that includes customers and simple service agreements. Such a structure ensures that customers have a stake in the shared services centre, and it also helps to secure efficiencies.
	Finally, it is very important that someone from the commercial sector outside Whitehall is hired to run any shared services centre that is being set up. If a centre is not run on proper commercial lines, the risk is that it will fall back into the bureaucracy from which it came.
	The second report to which I want to allude, somewhat more briefly, is entitled "Ministry of Defence: Leaving the Services". The reputation of RAF Benson in my constituency is that it is extremely good at looking after the human resources needs of its personnel, but I am concerned about the effect that leaving the services can have on a range of health and family issues, as well as employment. That is why, in 2009—I hope in association with the Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen Families Association and the Royal British Legion—I shall be running surgeries on the base to fill in some of the gaps.
	I took a look at the interview form that is completed for early service leavers, and it is not the most personal form that I have ever come across. As far as I could see, there is only one small box for additional personal information, with most of the rest of the form being concerned with handing people on as quickly as possible to other organisations, and to the jobcentre in particular.
	I am aware that the National Audit Office found in 2007 that services for early service leavers were inconsistent, and I hope that the Minister can reassure me that there is some measurement of whether that consistency is being put into the system. It is important that early service leavers in my constituency and elsewhere have access to consistent services.
	In addition, I should like the services to be joined up more with the services offered by local government, especially in relation to homelessness. Early service leavers are referred to a list of places, but the interview form does not seem to include any element that relates to passing them on to local government. Therefore, I was not surprised that many people responded to surveys asking for an evaluation of the resettlement packages by saying that they were not useful to their needs. I urge the Government to come forward with firmer proposals in that respect.

Austin Mitchell: I should like to begin by saying how much sheer pleasure I get from being a member of the PAC. I am very enthusiastic about it, and consider it the most interesting Committee appointment that I have ever had. The work that we do is an enormous source of satisfaction, covering as it does a wide spread of interest and subjects, and I compliment the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh) on his skilled chairmanship, despite the many divergent views among members. Moreover, our Chairman always makes a very pointed and effective introduction to our sittings. The fact that he steals most of the questions that I would want to ask in my interrogations is purely incidental, because I suppose that that is his job. It has also been a pleasure to work with members of the Committee. The hon. Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon), who is modestly exiting the Chamber before I can pay him any compliments, is one of the most effective questioners and financial analysts with whom I have ever worked. My right hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn (Mr. Touhig) brings to Committee a whole sheet of detailed questions, written on yellow paper in red ink. My correspondence is normally in green ink, as he will appreciate. His effective questioning of officials and Departments has been an inspiration. It is a pleasure to work on the Committee with those people. It is marvellous training or preparation for a ministerial job that I shall never have. It has been wasted on me; it came at the wrong stage in my career.

Richard Bacon: A fine wine takes the longest.

Austin Mitchell: Well, revolutions might happen, and we are all socialists now, so I have not altogether given up hope. I am very well trained, thanks to the Committee and to the hon. Member for Gainsborough. I want to make that clear, because it is such an effective Committee.
	I now want to express one or two reservations about problems. In some—or most—senses, our reports do not make the impact that they should. It is a confusing situation; a National Audit Office report comes out, and usually hits the headlines, and some months later, the Committee produces a report saying much the same thing. People are not sure who is saying what. The impact is dulled because the reports come out in two stages. We do not follow up on our reports effectively enough; that is a failure on our part. On the Table we can see a pile of our reports. We are a very hard-worked Committee.
	The Committee Clerks ring us up individually and ask us whether we want to do a radio or television interview about this, that or the other. I remember dealing with an unnecessary, expensive detention centre that had been built in the countryside around Oxford somewhere. I unearthed the fact that there were no security arrangements, as it had been built in that place because there was no bus service. Anyone escaping could not get a bus to the station to make their getaway. That was an extraordinary fact. Having revealed it in the course of the Committee's inquiries, I was asked to make a statement, but there was not time, and I could not do it adequately. We need a press office attached to the Committee to make sure that our reports have the impact that they deserve.
	The fact that our reports do not have the impact that they deserve is indicated by the attendance at today's debate. There is dynamite in many of those reports. It is red meat that the Opposition should be devouring; they should be mobilising to use it against the Government. The left in the Labour party should be using it to further their views about the efficiency of Government spending, yet it goes unnoticed. The reports sit there on the Table, we briefly mention them, and then they are forgotten. The lack of interest in our reports and the lack of effort that we make to put their content over to the public are disappointing.
	That is in total contrast with our American counterpart committees. I have watched them on C-SPAN, the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network. They are very effective; they are all on television, and they all have powerful, effective questioning. They haul the mightiest in the land before them and get headlines in the newspapers—and it is always a pleasure for a politician to get headlines in the newspapers. The lack of interest in our proceedings is depressing. It is partly our fault, because we do not have time to put over the arguments and give them political impact.
	It is unsatisfactory that we are always dealing with issues posthumously. We interview a body's current accounting officer, but the people and officials responsible for the decisions that we are questioning and criticising have retired, been moved on or moved out, or been made governor of some remote colonial possession that still lingers in the Government's purview. We never deal with the people who made the mistakes.

Richard Bacon: Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the most interesting thing about the NAO's regular reports on the Olympics—I think that there have been three or four—is not simply that they are about the Olympics but that they are not "posthumous", as he described it? They look forward to an event that has not yet taken place, and are getting in on the act much earlier in the cycle. Does he agree that that could represent a model that the NAO and, in turn, our Committee could apply to other areas of Government spending?

Austin Mitchell: Absolutely. We need to keep a running analysis as the situation develops, as it puts us in a more powerful position. However, in most subjects, we are not in that powerful position. The best instance is the Ministry of Defence information system, with which we dealt yesterday. The contract is behind schedule and over cost, as several such big contracts are. It was decided to introduce it in 2000, but—I speak from memory of yesterday's discussions—it was finally introduced in April 2005. The accounting officer with whom we dealt was amiable and effective in giving us the official view, but he was appointed in November 2005, so he had no responsibility for the system that he had to explain and defend.
	The one instance in which the official responsible appeared before the Committee was in the case of rural payments, and they were revealing about the procedures involved. I wish that we could have that experience more often. There is a problem with all the big IT projects that the Government are keen on. The intention is absolutely fantastic: details about this patient or that case or issue are open to access in any part of the country, depending on which train the laptop was left by the civil servant responsible. It is marvellous to have such access. There is too much enthusiasm for big projects, which are often too big. Every single one is inadequate; they are usually behind schedule—NHS Connecting for Health is one such project—well over budget and face many problems that are glossed over. There should be a centralised Government system to allow the civil service to vet and authorise those big projects before they go ahead, because I am not sure who is responsible for them.

Angela Eagle: In fact, the Office of Government Commerce is in the middle of developing a system that does just that. It is called the major projects review group, and it aims to get a handle on strategically important projects, whether they are large or small, and do precisely what my hon. Friend said, from beginning to end. It is a new way of doing things and I, for one, hope that it will remove some of the blood sport that my right hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn (Mr. Touhig) discussed in his speech.

Austin Mitchell: That is good to hear, and it is right that we should do it. However, it is a little late. It is closing the stable door after several big horses have bolted—and they are now wandering around the countryside, putting money into contracting firms and kicking people. Until now, the role of the OGC has been that of a marriage bureau, lining up Departments with IT firms and consultancies, rather than looking at the projects themselves and asking, "Are they too big? Are they trying to do too much?" That is the usual tendency, but we should ask whether those projects are going to produce a palpable gain, and what the position of the heritage system is while the new system is installed. That is never thought through, and I do not know why. I do not know whether Ministers are pushing the virtues of big computer contracts on the civil service, hoping that once everything is mobilised in such a fashion, government will be more efficient and cheaper to run and they can fire all the civil servants. I do not know whether it is a question of fashion in the Departments. I do not know whether every Department must have such a contract and the bigger it is the better, or whether there has been zealous salesmanship on the part of the companies. Who is to tell? Certainly, the projects are oversold, and the civil servants do not seem competent at cutting down to reasonable dimensions the brochures and vision that they are given by the salesmen and asking, "Is this really going to work?"
	There is a problem, and I am delighted to hear that something is being done about it, but at such a stage it is too late in our experience. We are left with several big projects that will be very difficult and very draining financially before they are working. There should be a degree of pre-testing, which does not seem to have occurred. Yesterday we were looking at the information system in the Ministry of Defence. When the computers were to be installed, it was found that they could not work in the existing buildings without serious modifications. They were never pre-tested. Again, some general review should require that and should require Departments to justify these big projects before they are authorised.
	Some means of central authorisation is necessary, and some degree of sanction against the firms that oversell the projects in the first place. On the tax credits issue, EDS had to pay compensation because of the inadequacy of the systems that it had installed, but that compensation was geared to EDS getting more Government contracts from which it could pay the compensation for the mess that it had made on the first Government contract. What an insane situation. If a firm screws up one contract, it gets other contracts to help it pay for the compensation on the contract that it screwed up. I have never heard anything like it.
	I do not know much about banking, but I can say that there is insufficient disciplining, control and sanctioning of companies if they fail. I should like to see the same procedure as for Gershon-style economies—the grinding Gershon wheel that is supposed to squeeze fat out of the Departments all the time, as they go along. That goes on remorselessly, even at a time when Departments are trying to carry on some major function. The Rural Payments Agency is a classic example. Because of the Gershon economies, people are being fired at the same time as the agency is embarking on one of the biggest tests of its efficiency and payments system that it is possible to imagine. The result is that it is understaffed, the people who know the work have gone, and the agency must hire them back again to make up deficiencies.
	Such economies must be co-ordinated. There is another example coming along in the Department for Work and Pensions, which is proposing to fire a large number of civil servants just as we all know that the coming recession will increase the number of unemployed, create more work for the Department and make its life more difficult. Nevertheless, it is proposing substantial reductions in personnel. The functions, personnel and computer systems of a Department need to be co-ordinated.
	I turn from such general preoccupations to a few specific points about some of the reports that we are discussing today. I was somewhat worried by the tax credit system, which we dealt with a week ago. It was implemented in too inflexible a form, which has resulted in large sums of money having to be clawed back from the poorest sections of society. Mainly because of the inflexibilities of the system, the people whom it was meant to help must repay large sums that they cannot afford and which, in fact, will never be recovered.
	The suspicion crosses my mind that Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, which does not want that burden—it is used to taking money from people, not giving it to them—is embarrassed by the situation and has therefore implemented the giving back or credit system in such a ham-handed fashion that the system is discredited. That is too malign a thought for our civil servants, but things have been cumbersome and the HMRC has been far too slow in bringing them into line. The testing has been inadequate. The system itself is good, but its implementation has been clumsy.
	The treatment of those who are being and have been asked to pay back large sums—they are particularly so for them—is in total contrast to what we saw in another of our reports on HMRC, about the management of large business corporation tax. According to  Private Eye and evidence given to us, the businesses that pay large sums in corporation tax are wined and dined by HMRC. Their representatives are taken out to expensive restaurants and asked how HMRC can be nicer to them, what would oil the wheels, and how the companies can be made to cough up voluntarily—a proposition that must be extraordinary to the large corporations. All that is in great contrast to the treatment of the poor, whose faces are ground in the debt and who are pursued in the most cruel fashion. They are taken to court and forced to repay.
	The report on the taxation of large corporations was very worrying. The position taken towards such corporations was, on the whole, one of trust—"We trust the chaps to fulfil their obligations." But we all know that a culture of tax avoidance, and in some cases tax evasion, permeates the whole of business. Companies, particularly big companies, are not paying the social rent that they owe this society for profits generated in this country. News Corporation Ltd is the classic example: it has very profitable investments in this country, but its tax affairs are fiddled through a whole plethora of tax havens and it does not make anything like the contribution that it should to this country, given the revenues and profits that it generates here. That is the culture, yet those are the chaps whom we are asked to trust to pay their tax obligations.
	The TUC has estimated that tax avoidance by companies and the wealthy costs everyone at work £1,000 a year. In other words, a total of £13 billion is lost through tax avoidance. We try to get to grips with the issue, but our effectiveness is nothing like that of the American committees. They have been dealing with the same culture as ours: big firms sell tax avoidance—and tax evasion—schemes to the companies in the knowledge that it will be profitable to implement them until the Internal Revenue Service catches up with them, as it eventually does.
	Interestingly, following a US Senate committee inquiry into the design, marketing and implementation of abusive tax avoidance schemes, KPMG, a firm of which I have heard, admitted criminal wrongdoing and was fined $456 million. That involved shuffling money around the world. The Committee found that major banks such as Deutsche Bank, HVB Bank, UBS and NatWest provided purported loans and credit lines for the purposes of tax avoidance. Those schemes were sold by KPMG and there is the same system here; it is just less publicised and more covert, because we never get to hear of the details.
	The US Senate report showed that from 2000 to 2007 Morgan Stanley helped clients to dodge payments of US dividend taxes of more than $300 million. The late lamented Lehman Brothers indulged in the same scheme. When e-mails from within Lehman Brothers were produced before the Senate committee, they showed one executive telling another that
	"the cash register is opening!!!!"
	and another saying:
	"Outstanding...Let's drain every last penny out of this"
	market opportunity.
	Those were the American investigations. We do not have the power and effectiveness of those committees—I wish that we did. We need to go into this area because it directly affects this country's finances on a massive scale, shifting the burden of taxation on to individual taxpayers in favour of a big industry of tax avoidance and evasion in which companies are not paying their way. Our recommendations were very good, but we encountered the disadvantage of their not being publicised enough and not becoming part of a major debate.
	We pointed out that whereas the Americans have an estimate of the tax gap—in other words, the tax that corporations should be paying as compared to what they do pay—we found that HMRC had no measure of that tax gap and appeared reluctant to develop such a measure. Unless we have a knowledge of the sums at issue and how the matter is being dealt with, we cannot possibly deal with it. An outstanding recommendation of ours was that it should develop such a measure and it should be publicised. We need to know what the tax gap is, how much has been avoided and how much has been evaded. We found that as HMRC has reduced the use of generic avoidance schemes, tax advisers have developed bespoke schemes that are now flogged to help business.
	We found, too, that HMRC would find difficulty as regards its staffing in coping with the clever, highly paid boys who devote their whole lives to devising schemes that can be sold on to the banks and other businesses to avoid taxation. There is clearly a problem in terms of the amount that HMRC can pay its staff compared with the amount paid by the institutions—the big accountancy houses and others—in developing these schemes. The two areas are totally unmatched. HMRC's large business service faces a loss of skills and industry knowledge as more experienced staff are due to retire. It will have to recruit people with the skills and ability and at the pay level necessary to cope with this issue.
	This is an excellent report on our part, but it has fallen with a dull thud and without the public reaction that it should have generated and deserves. We are dealing with a major political issue—one of a whole series that we come across in our work. We need to be able to promote it further, push into the political forum and get it discussed instead of seeing it falling mutely like a feather on the waters; I was about to say a tomb of silence, but I am mixing my metaphors too much. We are doing important and valuable work—frightening work in the sense that there is so little sanction and so little discussion at the end of the day. Apart from that, more power to our elbow.

Angela Browning: It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell); he is never a feather to fall silently on water.
	I begin by apologising to the House for not being here at the beginning of the debate as I had a prior engagement. I gave my personal apologies to my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh), and I pay tribute to his chairmanship of our Committee. I would like to put on record how much we on the Public Accounts Committee owe to the National Audit Office for the calibre of report that it puts before us. The reports are always of such high quality that it is a pleasure to work to them, although I sometimes find it rather challenging to have to read up on two separate subjects a week.
	I would like to touch on some common themes, not just in the reports that are before the House today which have recently been considered by the Public Accounts Committee, but in what happens once the NAO report has been published and we are yet to take evidence. One cannot help but feel that the moment an NAO report arrives in the public domain the Department it refers to goes into frenzied activity in order to try to mitigate some of the recommendations or criticisms before the permanent secretary and other officials are required to attend an evidence session. I am sure that it is just hearsay that there is a special training course for permanent secretaries who may have to appear before the Committee.
	During the time I have served on the Committee, I have not found any discourtesy in the treatment of civil servants, although probing questions are asked. However, there are times when the subject matter that we are dealing with reflects not so much the role of the accounting officer but the policy behind it, and often one wishes that not just civil servants but the Ministers responsible for the policy were appearing before us. Unfortunately, as the accounting officer, the permanent secretary has to account for the public expenditure. One cannot help feeling that, given the number of times in evidence we are told, "Since the NAO report was published, we have made huge improvements", the reports are seen as a trigger for improvement.
	That picks up on what Members from all parties have referred to during this debate: the need to look at how the civil service and Departments work—individually and collectively, because often there are cross-departmental issues. If the NAO has picked up on difficulties, discrepancies and lack of good use of public money, surely there should be a better mechanism in individual ministries so that they can identify much of that for themselves and address it before the NAO trigger is reached, valuable though it is—although we would not wish the Committee to be decommissioned because it was no longer seen as necessary. Ministries are reactive to the reports, and one wonders what is lacking in their structure that means that they do not pick up on such issues earlier.
	I would like to make some suggestions that pick up on what others have said today. Like many Members, I am occasionally invited to speak to the National School of Government, formerly known as the Civil Service College, and as a former Minister I hold the training of civil servants in our country in high esteem. I know that it is fair game to criticise the civil service, but we have one of the best civil services in the world, and its training is very good. However, somehow it has lagged behind the commercial sector in integrating core management skills into the workings of the organisation—or in this case the Department. I shall come on to the IT skills and commissioning that has been mentioned. As a member of an institute that is interested in management, I feel that Departments should improve their skills in two core areas.
	The first area is management information systems. It is key that such systems are considered, whether for an individual project or a strategic overview of a Ministry in carrying out its duties. People should be properly trained to ensure that information is both timely and relevant to ensuring that the Ministry works efficiently. My hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon) said that he had identified a lack of accounting skills in key positions. One would have thought that that was pretty basic. If one has a work force who lack skills, one should adjust one's recruiting programme and in-service training to ensure that the skills are obtained or recruited in. As time goes by, one gets the impression that that work is not done quickly enough to tackle some of the problems that we consider in the Public Accounts Committee.
	The second area is project management. Outwith the IT side of things, project management should be integrated more, and the skills associated with it should be integrated into Departments. Lack of continuity has been mentioned. A long-term project is difficult to achieve when there is no continuity among the people who have to oversee it. Sometimes that cannot be avoided, but if a project has been set up properly, with a proper management system, one should be able to replace key people as it progresses without causing detriment to it. The reports from the NAO and the PAC suggest that the civil service should completely review its training and recruitment for and management of those two core functions.
	Some of the problems that the reports identify are persistent. Even when they are identified, it is often difficult to ensure that they are corrected in a timely manner. Although there are several examples, I shall refer to the single payment scheme, about which our report states that, although most farmers are being paid earlier than they were in 2005, "errors persist", and that the Government run the risk of being fined hundreds of millions of pounds. One would think that every warning bell in the Ministry would ring at that. Apart from the practicalities of getting the scheme right, the Ministry was heading down a road that would leave the British taxpayer culpable for such a fine. That should have been picked up early. If proper project management had been applied to the scheme, the problems might have been avoided. The does not apply only to the single payment scheme—there have been persistent problems with tax credits and pay-as-you-earn.

Richard Bacon: Before my hon. Friend moves on from the single payment scheme, let me point out that, although there might not have been adequate project management, a series of Office of Government Commerce reviews was published in the back of one of the NAO reports on the Rural Payments Agency. They showed that, time and again, the OGC gateway process produced red traffic lights, but nothing happened. At no point did anyone at the centre say, "Stop." Things simply carried on.

Angela Browning: Indeed. That is why I believe that such projects need to be properly managed, and key people need to take responsibility for them. If there is a properly drafted project management scheme, those responsible should be easily identifiable. As my hon. Friend said, that did not happen and, as he pointed out in his speech, the appalling record keeping compounded the single payment scheme's problems. As I said earlier, I believe that the political imperative was sometimes to blame. Sometimes it would be helpful to have a Minister rather than a civil servant present. I recall that when the right hon. Member for Derby, South (Margaret Beckett) as Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs announced the single payment scheme to the House, it was done in a very hurried way.
	Let me come on to information technology commissioning and the overseeing of IT, which lie at the heart of many of the problems brought before the Public Accounts Committee and covered in its reports. It seems to me that the single payment scheme is a classic example of a policy being introduced hastily—possibly against the advice of civil servants at the time, although how would we know for sure? If more time were taken and more trialling done before a policy was rolled out as a national scheme, the Government and relevant Departments would hopefully pick up more of the many problems caused by complex IT schemes—problems for our constituents and, more particularly for the PAC, problems that lead to a huge waste of taxpayers' money.
	I say again that I am not an IT expert, so I am nervous of venturing down the path of making recommendations on IT to the Government, but it seems to me that the commissioning of software is a particular problem and that the people who draw up the specifications in the first place often do not have the necessary qualifications or knowledge. That brings me back to having proper management information systems—all these issues feed into each other—that are necessary in order to commission correctly.
	There are always going to be glitches with major IT projects—there are bound to be; it is never going to be perfect the first time round—but by trialling and sorting out the glitches before a programme is rolled out, the Government and Departments could avoid many of the difficulties. That applies not just to DEFRA—or EFRA as it is now often called—but across the board. Perhaps one of the worst examples was the commissioning of projects in the Ministry of Defence, but problems have been evident in the NHS and the Department for Work and Pensions, as well as in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Ministry of Defence.
	I hope that as a result of today's debate the Minister will take forward some of the overall concerns that have been expressed. We have heard specific complaints about individual reports, but I am referring to overall concerns about recurring problems and common themes that the PAC all too often picks up in its reports.
	I conclude by noting the opportunity presented to the PAC to come back to its reports more frequently than at present. It is very difficult to decide which of the National Audit Office reports should be considered in an evidence sitting—ideally, we would like to consider them all. Two a week when the House is sitting is a lot of reading, but, equally, the power of the PAC in comparison with other Select Committees is that it has the opportunity to call the permanent secretary and other officials back in order to monitor progress after the previous report. We already do that to a degree, but in my opinion, not enough. If we could bring reports back more frequently, where appropriate, we could make more of a difference to some ongoing and persistent problems.

Justine Greening: It is a pleasure to respond to this debate, which has been fascinating to listen to. Speaking as someone who spent about 14 or 15 years in business and industry before becoming an MP, I know that many of the issues spoken about today make a lot of sense, as I often ran up against them in industry.
	The excellent Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee—I shall pay further, more detailed tribute to him shortly—rightly opened the debate by pointing to the considerable changes that have occurred since we debated the previous PAC reports back in May. If we had thought back in May that we would see the current bank rescue plan, hear the word "nationalisation" being used more frequently than it has been for years, and witness the general worsening of our country's fiscal position—the Governor of the Bank of England delivered a bleak prognosis only this week, and today the Institute for Fiscal Studies has reportedly flagged up a potential £125 billion black hole in the public finances—we would have found it difficult to believe that all that could happen so quickly.
	There is no doubt that times are changing, but one of the reassuring facts to which we can cling in these changing times is that not everything changes; some things remain constant. For me, the work of the PAC is one of the reliable constants that we have in public life. There are a number of reasons why the Committee works so well, and I hope to discuss them briefly, but first I want to add to what others have said about some of the issues raised in the reports.
	The Committee's leadership is, of course, critical. There is no doubt that the ethos of the Committee—its tenacity, and its forensic ability to look under the difficult stones and rocks presented by the Government—is embodied in my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh). He set out very clearly the challenges that the Committee faces in examining so many different topics. As we have seen today, it contains a unique combination of talents: an eclectic mix of members, with a massive variety of not just skills but opinions. I pay tribute to its Chairman for his ability to corral that diversity of talent, skills and opinion into such powerful reports. There is real verve in the Committee's work and, beneath it all, a clear understanding of what it is there to do—to play a critical role in carrying out its parliamentary scrutiny of the work of Government.
	What strikes me when I listen to and participate in debates on the PAC is the breadth of its remit. We need only consider the sheer breadth of the issues covered by the reports, which range from tax credits and PAYE in the eighth report to the 2012 Olympics in London in the 14th report, the single payment scheme in the 29th report, and benefit fraud. People are often asked to engage in a trade-off between quantity and quality, but—as was made clear by my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Angela Browning)—although the Committee's members may have to wade through an awful lot of material, they make no trade-off in favour of either quantity or quality. It produces numerous reports, which are always of extremely high quality.
	I was particularly interested to hear the Chairman's views on financial management, reducing internal costs and understanding risks. I felt that he hit the nail on the head in highlighting those three elements. Without them, it is difficult for any Government of any political persuasion to deliver true value for money, which is, of course, the key focus of the PAC.
	As was suggested by my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton, in today's IT age there should be more scope for understanding of the financial management of Government than ever before. We should have better data and information to enable us to exert control over public expenditure, and over the devising of policy more generally, by means of effective decision making. However, that does not seem to be happening, as has been emphasised in a number of the PAC's reports. Three examples are the tax credits report, the benefit fraud report and—this was close to my heart because I am a London Member—the 2012 Olympics report.
	I was shocked to see in the benefit fraud report that £2 billion of taxpayers' money has been lost owing to customer and official error, and it is worrying to learn that that has doubled in the last five years. There is no doubt in my mind that the complexity of the benefit system is one of the key reasons why this is able to happen.
	On tax credits, we heard that £4.3 billion of taxpayers' money remains to be recovered. All those who hold their constituency surgeries on a weekly basis, as I do, regularly see people who have been the victims, as it were, of overpayments and who are now having to struggle to pay the money back. The Committee is right to point out that there must be a question mark over how much of that £4.3 billion that has been overpaid will ever actually be recovered.
	I was particularly interested in the London 2012 Olympics report, and I was fascinated to learn of the Committee's concerns about the unrealistic original budgeting for the Olympics. As an accountant, I shared those concerns about the robustness of that budget when the Olympics Bill passed through this House. It is one of the reasons why I was one of the few Members who voted to cap the contribution of the London taxpayer to the London Olympics budget; I had a clear sense that an increase in that budget would be required, and that that would swiftly make its way into the taxpaying liability of London taxpayers—and, unfortunately, I can clearly see that happening. I hope that over the coming years the Committee will be able to return to not only difficult issues such as tax credits and benefits fraud but the London Olympics, to continue to watch how taxpayers' money is being managed and how the Government are delivering value for taxpayers' money.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough raised the very pertinent and valid issue of financial skills and awareness among not only civil servants who are responsible for budgets, but those who are non-financially responsible, as it were. With my background as an accountant, I fully understand why being able to manage budgets is important, but it is also vital for the accountability of Government, because when all the political rhetoric of this place is set aside, in my experience all we are often left with is the figures. Therefore, being able to understand what the figures mean is crucial for parliamentary accountability. As my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell) articulately pointed out, it is essential to have the figures in place against which Government can be held to account on whether they planned ahead or went into the necessary detail. The reports often rightly point out that there was not sufficient planning ahead on key projects or enough detail in implementation plans, and that insufficient project management skills were brought to bear. The result is that we lose taxpayer value for money and gain Government waste.
	Another reason why it is vital that all civil servants have an ability to manage finances—after all, they are all ultimately responsible for some form of taxpayers' money in their activities—is that when people understand how to manage the budgets they are impacting on and responsible for, they have the confidence to be able to take better decisions. The worst situations I have come across in industry have been when I have been confronted with people who were not clear about how to manage their resources, and who therefore would resort to ever more elaborate ways of hiding that fact by generally making their resource management as complex as possible, as once other people understood how they were managing their budgets it became clear that they were not doing so very effectively. Therefore, giving people the toolkit to manage their budgets better means that we are bound to have much better taxpayer value for money.
	I also welcome the upcoming national audit reviews of the financial management of each Department, because I have no doubt that the reviews themselves and the reports they generate will be of great value to the Departments and will also provide valuable fodder for careful consideration by the PAC. If government is to be set up for success, it is vital that we have good financial control, clear accountability and good information and transparency across the board. We must confront issues, whether climate change and carbon footprints—that is ultimately about how broadly we examine the carbon impact of different options—immigration and the contribution that migration brings to this country, or another diverse topic, calculating our debt. Ultimately, it is critical to understand what are the right figures to examine in any given situation, and that means good training. It is only with good training that we will end up with much better decision making.
	I share the frustration of the right hon. Member for Islwyn (Mr. Touhig) about waste. He talked about the very real impact that it has on projects in his constituency, and we can all think of such projects in our own constituencies. I instantly thought of Elliott school, which is desperate for capital spending to make it a school that we can be proud of, and the lifts that we are keen to get at East Putney station to make it accessible to everyone. Such projects bring into sharp focus the cost of waste, which is much more than just a figure—it is money that cannot be spent on the key projects that communities across Britain would like it to be spent on. We all have such projects in our constituencies, and they demonstrate clearly why the work of the PAC is so important.
	Comments have been made about responsibility for decisions and waste, which is critical. Running through all the comments has been frustration and the sense that there needs to be more accountability and responsibility for things when they go wrong. Having come into the House from industry, I get worried that it seems that the best way for a civil servant to stop their next promotion is to say no to a Minister and to be the person who tells him or her that things are not going well and that change is needed.

Angela Eagle: I agree with a great deal of what the hon. Lady is saying, but I wanted to pop up while she was talking about promotion and civil servants to point out to her that Ministers have no bearing whatever on who is promoted in the civil service. That is done independently. It actually sometimes gets a bit frustrating for Ministers to see people who are doing a superb job not being promoted as much as we might want. There has always been a strict separation.

Justine Greening: I am very grateful for that extremely helpful intervention. It brings me to the point that I was trying to make, which is that a lot of risk management goes on in government, but sometimes it is—dare I say?—too focused on short-term political risk rather than the longer-term delivery risk of particular projects.
	My hon. Friends the Members for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon), for Henley and for Tiverton and Honiton made clear points about the issues that the Public Accounts Committee has highlighted, especially those to do with IT projects. I know that the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell) shares our real frustration with a whole range of projects, but he said that we are all socialists now. Although I have said that I am concerned that things are not looking good in our country at the moment, I do not think that they are quite that bad. I share much of his frustration, but that was definitely one comment with which I could not agree.
	I found the comments of the hon. Member for Southport (Dr. Pugh) extremely interesting. He was the one Member who talked particularly about property management. That topic perhaps does not get as much attention as it ought to, and I was extremely pleased to see the PAC examine it. As the Member whose constituency contains the site of the old Putney hospital, which has been derelict for 10 years, I have found it amazing that property management across government sometimes happens at a pace that seems glacial compared with what would happen outside this place. The Committee's report on that matter was quite important in generating a debate not just inside but outside the House.
	I shall wrap up by again congratulating the PAC and its Clerks. It plays a crucial role in our parliamentary democracy and in ensuring that the Government and Ministers are accountable. As I said, its spirit is embodied in the articulate, forensic and tenacious approach of its Chairman, my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough, who opened today's debate. I wish the Committee well in the many challenging reports that I am sure it will produce over the next few months, and I look forward to our next chance to debate the results of those reports in this Chamber.

Angela Eagle: It is a great pleasure to have the opportunity to respond, once more, to our debate on the Public Accounts Committee's reports—this is the third time that I have done so. Today's debate has demonstrated not only the wide-ranging nature of the PAC's work, but the fascinating insight that it gives its members into the way in which government works. I speak as a three-times member of the Committee; I was a member when I was in opposition and when I was on the Back Benches in government after having been a Minister, and I am now a member, although in the slightly more formal sense of being the Treasury team's representative on the Committee.
	I have always been a great advocate of the Committee's worth; it proves its worth every time it sits. That tradition has been carried on under its current Chairman in the usual fine way, and I too congratulate him on the work that he does. The Committee builds on a great, long and proud tradition of ensuring that public moneys, which are voted by Parliament, are properly accounted for in respect of value for money and ensuring that the appropriate lessons can be learned when reports are produced.
	In these difficult and turbulent times, thinking about what the Committee does might not be to the fore. People might call its work accountability and they might dismiss it as housekeeping, but it is even more important in difficult and turbulent times; a recurring theme of today's speeches has been that public expenditure and getting value for every pound spent becomes even more important. I know that members of the Committee are driven by a strong desire to secure high quality public services and value for the money spent, and I share that desire.
	Working in the Treasury recently has obviously been challenging, but I suspect that the same could be said in respect of every finance ministry in the world, as we have been struggling to deal with the turbulence and the unique set of circumstances endangering the global financial system. Some of us have only read about such times in history books; actually experiencing them is a different thing. In this storm, the Government's priority is financial stability, as my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer has repeatedly made clear in statements to the House. We are determined to do whatever it takes to secure that stability, and we have already put in place a comprehensive package of measures to support the financial system and to protect ordinary savers and businesses, who rely on a strong banking system in order for the economy to work. We maintain a careful watching brief.
	As a number of reports this week from the CBI, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research and the Governor of the Bank of England have made clear, we are in very difficult and challenging times. The economy is dealing with the biggest shock to the system for generations, and the Government will continue to act to ensure that we get through these challenges in the fairest way possible. I assure all hon. Members that we will continue to pay extremely close attention to the work of the PAC, even in times when the attention of the media and others who follow our debates is torn to other areas.
	The Government take the recommendations of the Committee very seriously and have a good record in implementing the vast majority of them. This year in response to the Committee's requests, Departments will report progress on all their outstanding agreed recommendations in their autumn performance reports, which I think will be an extremely good discipline on them. It may focus a few minds and ensure that things that may have slipped off the radar suddenly re-emerge so that that they can receive the focus that they deserve.
	I want to respond to some of the issues raised by right hon. and hon. Members. The Chairman of the Committee, the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh)—whom we all love and who has had a lot of praise today—had a little dig at the Treasury with respect to the efficiency of the use of the Government's property and pointed out, helpfully I thought, that the Treasury sat at the bottom of the list. We have taken action to mitigate that and have continued to increase our building occupancy since 2005-06, increasing our net internal area figure—the hon. Gentleman will know what that is —for 1 Horse Guards road, our main building, from 21.9 sq m per full-time equivalent person to 16.62 sq m, which I think is significant progress.
	We continue also to look for new tenants to take up the vacant space but I hope that the hon. Gentleman will recognise that the fact that the Treasury's main building has some constraints upon it because of its listed status, the wide range and sweep of some of the stairwells and the width of some of the corridors make it difficult to use absolutely every square inch in the efficient way in which some newer buildings might be utilised. However, I assure him that we continue to try to make progress on that, and we have made some.
	The Committee Chairman said that there was a narrowed ideological gap between all parties. I do not know whether that means that we are all socialists. The hon. Member for Putney (Justine Greening) was denying that earlier. I have an inkling that the ideological gap has widened in the last few months and we are no longer talking about how to manage a system established post-Thatcher and Reagan, but are looking to see how the pieces will reorder themselves after the shocks that we have had. This is only a personal opinion; ideological gaps might be widening rather than narrowing, but I am sure time will tell.
	My right hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn (Mr. Touhig) expressed great frustration, which everybody shares, at the opportunity cost of money that is wasted and what could have been done with it if it had been used more effectively and efficiently. That is right at the heart of the work that the Committee does and my right hon. Friend represented the zeal with which those of us who have been privileged enough to sit on the PAC during the course of our parliamentary careers—at whatever stage that might be—can identify and feel. Committee members in the debate today have managed to get across that motivation. I share his ambition to reduce the "blood sport" nature of the Committee's hearings, even though Ministers do not appear before it, a fact that has been commented on today. If the hearings are less like a blood sport, it will improve the efficiency and value for money of Government expenditure. I therefore share my right hon. Friend's ambition to try to make them a kinder experience.
	The hon. Member for Southport (Dr. Pugh) made some interesting points, ranging from money laundering in foreign dependencies to the review of neonatal care, which was similar to the work that the Committee did last year on social care—taking a more thematic approach to areas that do not always get considered. He also talked about the report on leaving the services, which was raised by other hon. Members. He set out a forward agenda, and was possibly making a bid that the Chairman will doubtless consider and will make a few civil servants shake in their boots, as he suggested consideration of the remuneration of senior civil servants. Far be it from me to comment on that, because the Chairman will obviously decide how he wants to take forward the work of the Committee in conjunction with his colleagues.
	As usual, the hon. Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon) walked in with a huge box full of all of the reports that we are discussing. I have a list of them on a large piece of paper, but he has a box of them, which sums up the way in which he approaches his work on the Committee. He is on top of all the detail of its scrutiny. He asked why EDS has not paid HMRC's compensation. There was a PAC hearing on 8 October at which the subject came up —[ Interruption. ] Ah, the hon. Gentleman was in Turkey so he missed the vital information that would have answered his question. The acting chief executive officer of HMRC said that it was in delicate negotiations on that very subject. The time by which HMRC expects to be paid runs out in the next couple of months and the acting CEO made it clear that he intends to be paid, but asked for the Committee's forbearance while the discussions concluded. The Chairman said that that was reassuring. I am sure that the hon. Member for South Norfolk will pursue the issue the next chance he gets, if he is not in Turkey—

Richard Bacon: May I just point out that I was not on a beach: I was speaking at a symposium on the changing role of Parliament and the budget process.

Angela Eagle: That is entirely typical of the hon. Gentleman's commitment to his duties and how seriously he takes the whole issue of financial control and probity.
	The hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) gave the House the benefit of his experience of introducing shared services in a diverse and complex organisation. I for one think that he has picked on the right areas for attention, and it is important that those who are thinking about removing duplication and achieving efficiency savings through shared services take into account the issues that he raised. We agree that there is great potential to make savings in that area, but it has to be done properly and effectively or else it can be counter-productive. We agree that there is potential to make central Government savings, and that is why my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary has announced the operational efficiency programme, which has a particular strand to consider the potential for shared services. I shall point out the hon. Gentleman's observations to those who are doing that work.
	The enthusiasm felt by my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell) about his appointment to the Committee was obvious to all who listened to his speech. His enthusiasm has not dimmed since his last contribution to such a debate, which is always a good sign. We know that the trend is possibly even up when it comes to enthusiasm. I agree that it is a pleasure to work on the Committee, having done so twice. I also agree that it is very good training for a ministerial post. I am sure that those Members who have had the privilege to serve in government and who have been on the Committee would agree that it gave us a great deal of insight and never leaves us when we are making our decisions. It has a positive bearing on how we approach ministerial life. If my hon. Friend aspires to a ministerial post, then he never knows—stranger things have happened. I wish him luck if he has any ambitions in that direction.

Austin Mitchell: I am grovelling hard.

Angela Eagle: I have to say that in 16 years in this House, I have never seen my hon. Friend grovel. He has obviously decided that I have no influence in these matters and his grovelling must be going elsewhere. I wish him luck with it.
	My hon. Friend made some extremely important points about the culture of tax avoidance and evasion. Obviously, we take that issue extremely seriously, although I suspect that he doubted that. I shall draw his comments to the attention of HMRC.
	The hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Angela Browning) did what many other hon. Members have done today and went from the specific to the general. Common themes always come out when one is considering value for money, such as how one can create a process that minimises the chances for waste and increases the possibility that we will get the best value for money that we can. She identified that core management skills and project management skills are important. As a former Minister, she will know that some areas of Whitehall are better at that than others. There is a general recognition in the senior civil service that there is a shortage of project management skills for many reasons, but I can assure her that the Office of Government Commerce and senior management figures in Whitehall are extremely aware of that and are taking action to try to deal with it.

Angela Browning: I recall, in a former life, being required at very short order to remove all ruminant feeds from every mill in the country. We did not have the staff with the project management skills to do that at the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food at the time, so we borrowed people from the Department of Trade and Industry, who were very competent. Obviously, one would like every ministry to have its own skill set, but is there enough identification between ministries of people who could be seconded to do specific tasks?

Angela Eagle: I agree with the hon. Lady's general observation. There are weaknesses in particular Departments, but there are also weaknesses because of the silo nature of Whitehall. The connections between Departments are often not as strong as any of us would like to see. I reassure her that the OGC is apprised of that fact, particularly with respect to procurement. I know that procurement is not everything, but £175 billion of public procurement a year, of which £70 billion is carried out centrally by Whitehall Departments, is quite a big slug of money to focus on to begin with. That is why we are conducting procurement capability reviews in every Department, and they will be published. We are having a very good exchange with senior managers, who are engaging not in a defensive way but in a way that demonstrates that they are willing to learn.
	As part of transforming the Government procurement process, we are also trying to give much more training and recognition to procurement professionals across Whitehall. We want to begin to create a cross-Whitehall and cross-departmental culture of procurement. That will benefit both procurement and project management, and there are solid foundations for the development of an approach that will break through the silo mentality that everyone who has been in Government will have experienced. Everyone in the House who deals with Departments can sense that mentality and knows that it exists. I am optimistic that we are making progress in that area, but I cannot say that all the problems are solved and that there is not a shortage of procurement skills in the public service.
	The hon. Member for Gainsborough asked whether the hopes of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to raise £100 million from the private sector to go to the training and support of elite British athletes were still realistic. Obviously, I should like to begin by joining him in congratulating our sports men and women on their excellent performances in Beijing. We will all remember their various triumphs for a long time, but we also need to recall that, in addition to the lottery funding, £265 million of Government revenue was given to elite athletes for training and support ahead of the Beijing games. For the first time ever, that money included individual living cost allowances that enabled the athletes to focus on full-time training for their sports. That was very successful in helping them to achieve the excellence that they did achieve. We stand by our commitment to give our elite athletes the best possible preparation. There can be no absolute guarantee of private sector funding, especially in circumstances that are changing as much as the present ones, but we continue to work towards securing it.
	I shall take a little of the House's time to talk about some of the general issues raised by the hon. Member for Gainsborough. He asked about the governance of the National Audit Office, and a great deal has happened in that respect since our last debate five months ago. We need to recognise the changes to the NAO that will take place in the coming year, and I am especially grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his continuing efforts, which he mentioned in his contribution, in helping to bring about essential reforms to the office's governance, as recommended by the Public Accounts Commission. We all want those reforms to be introduced, and I am pleased that the process of appointing for a new commission chairman and new Comptroller and Auditor General has begun. I have every expectation that successful candidates of the right calibre can be announced in due course.
	I should also like to record the Government's gratitude to Tim Burr, who has displayed impressive abilities as CAG. He deservedly commands the respect of the Government and all of us in the House as he guides and leads the organisation through this period of transition. We need the NAO to hold the Government to account, and he is tenacious in ensuring that that continues to happen.
	As I have said on previous occasions, I believe that full and open financial transparency is an essential characteristic of a modern parliamentary democracy. The hon. Member for Putney said that when all the political rhetoric is settled, in the end the numbers remain. It helps us to interpret them if we get them in a timely fashion. The PAC, supported by the NAO, has been at the heart of the scrutiny process for an extremely long time. I think that the Committee as an entity goes all the way back to Gladstone—although I am obviously not referring to its present membership; we might feel quite old sometimes, but I hope that we never feel that old, collectively or individually.
	I recognise and applaud the Committee's unfailing and challenging examination of the Government's use of the money that Parliament has voted to them. It undoubtedly aids parliamentary accountability. However, we cannot allow ourselves to sit on our laurels just because the Committee has existed for so long and is venerable; we have to keep looking into how we can modernise the way in which the system works. Our alignment project, which the Prime Minister announced in July 2007 in the Green Paper "The Governance of Britain" aimed to carry out that modernisation. When implemented, it will simplify and put in a more consistent format public spending plans, parliamentary Supply estimates and published resource accounts. In essence, that means that Parliament and the public will be able to compare apples with apples, and pears with pears, instead of apples with pears, or chalk with cheese.
	I hope that the project will greatly facilitate a reasonable understanding of where money goes, how it flows through the system, where it was when Parliament voted on its use, and to what effect it was used. Members of Parliament, Select Committees, the public and commentators should be able to track departmental spending more easily, all the way from the planning and budgeting stages to the out-turn. The alignment project does not sound particularly exciting, but those of us who have seen how it will work when it is finished are excited by it, and I am sure that the Committee is, too.
	As we said earlier, the Committee has managed to publish 30 reports since our last debate on the subject. It is exhausting just looking at them. We have had a flavour of them today. Those listening to our debates will appreciate the sheer breadth of the work that has been done. It is no mean achievement, and it clearly demonstrates the Committee's huge work load. I want to say a few words about the Committee's 44th report. The formal Treasury minute has not yet been presented to the House, but the report is about the roll-out of the Jobcentre Plus office network, which I was involved in when I was a Minister at the Department for Work and Pensions. It was heartening to read the Committee's report, and it is pleasing to know that when things go well, the Committee fully acknowledges the achievement.
	I agree with the report that there are important lessons to learn from any transformation project, and certainly from the transformation of Jobcentre Plus from a decrepit and inefficient network of 1,500 offices scattered randomly around the country. As I recall, the furniture was bolted to the floor when I was first responsible for them. The offices have been changed into a high-quality, well-located network of 800 offices fit for the 21st century. Staff in the offices will have a very important job to do, given what has happened to unemployment figures in the past few months. The offices are now more efficient and are equipped to do that job, thanks to the effective transformation of that public sector service.

Richard Bacon: I was just looking through my pile of papers, having forgotten the Minister's comment that the Treasury has not issued a minute on the report in question. The single most interesting aspect of that Jobcentre Plus report—this is reflected in its first recommendation—is that the three witnesses before us had, between them, 112 years of experience. Lesley Strathie, the then chief executive of Jobcentre Plus, and the other two witnesses had, between them, well over 100 years of experience. They started as clerical assistants, not fast-track administrative trainees. Are there not potentially huge lessons for Whitehall to learn from that, in light of what we have been saying about project management?

Angela Eagle: I would like to congratulate and commend Lesley Strathie, then chief executive of Jobcentre Plus, on the work that she and her team did to bring about that transformation. The hon. Gentleman makes a perfectly reasonable point. I always found, when I was a Minister in the Department for Work and Pensions, that stress-testing reforms with the people on the front line who use the systems, and getting their feedback on what I was trying to do, was far better than any number of consultants' reports, glossy though they may be. Consultants were completely unused to the experience of using and administering the system daily. Lesley Strathie and her team clearly learned that lesson when they were undertaking the transformation. I thank the Public Accounts Committee for giving credit where credit is due, because it is important that credit is given, as well as honest criticism.

Don Touhig: That was an exceptionally good report, and Jobcentre Plus made a huge difference; the staff have been empowered, and their whole attitude is completely different. Is not the report something that the Government should send to every permanent secretary in Whitehall, saying, "If they can do it, you can do it"?

Angela Eagle: I suspect that if we sent an e-mail to every permanent secretary and asked them to look at the report, that would be a better way of doing it, and I certainly undertake to draw it to their attention.
	I understand the irritation of the Committee and its Chairman at the publication in February by the Department for Transport of revised vehicle excise duty evasion estimates for 2007, which indicated that evasion was much lower than cited in the PAC's fifth report published a month earlier. I am very sorry that the subsequent publication of a Treasury minute, made in error, compounded an unfortunate series of events. That sounds like a film or a book, but it is something that Committee members and the NAO had to put up with. I hope that Members accept that at no time did the Government seek to mislead or somehow embarrass the Committee. Lessons have been learned from that experience, and we will strive to avoid a recurrence of such an episode.
	We should after all rejoice that following the introduction of an automated number plate recognition system, evasion of vehicle excise duty, with its implications for accurate licensing information and the detection of crime and public revenue, is at a low level, which is something we all welcome. People who see the police using that information to great effect, as I have in my local area, to prevent further crime, know how important it is to have accuracy.
	The PAC has expressed continuing interest in the private finance initiative, and its recommendations and reports on the matter are invaluable. Hon. Members have helped us to review, reflect and revise our views. The Committee has added value by choosing a wide and useful range of topics over the years. It has helped us assess and analyse the risks in infrastructure projects, and improve the means of procurement and efficiency. We look forward to continuing that fruitful dialogue as we extend the range of approaches to complex procurement, always seeking best value for money for the taxpayer.
	The PAC's recent recommendations in its September report, "HM Treasury: Making changes in operational PFI projects", were welcomed by the Treasury. I was pleased that the Committee endorsed recent Treasury guidance that will help to ensure that value for money is obtained when changes are made, and that it has also endorsed the roll-out of training programmes to support contract management. Before I conclude, may I touch on the concerns expressed by the hon. Member for Gainsborough about the apparent largesse of space at the Treasury, which I have addressed in a separate note outwith my speech? Finally, may I repeat my gratitude for the hard work of the PAC and the National Audit Office, which ably supports it. Together, they make a major and lasting contribution to the performance and delivery of public services across the United Kingdom, and they keep the Government and public servants on their toes. Their work will continue to be as effective as it has always been, and I look forward to working with them in future and, if circumstances allow—one never knows—to other occasions such as this.

Edward Leigh: It is a pleasure briefly to thank everyone who has taken part this afternoon. I thank the right hon. Member for Islwyn (Mr. Touhig), who made the first speech in the general debate, and initiated an interesting theme to which we have returned several times and to which the Committee, too, may have to return. Why do civil servants not take responsibility? Are we rewarding them enough for success? Are we sacking those who fail? Of course, they are never sacked. The theme was taken up by the hon. Member for Southport (Dr. Pugh).
	I am divided in my own mind about these matters. One part of me is rather old-fashioned—perhaps old Labour. I support the traditional concept of the British civil service as incorruptible, with staff remaining in it all their lives, and as not having a great interface with the private sector, which can cause many problems. So part of me is old Labour and part of me is old Conservative, in that I recognise the importance of financial inducements in promoting productivity. That is why we now have bonuses in the civil service. "Bonus" is almost a swear word because of what is happening in the banking sector, but we have to get it right.
	If ever there were to be a change of Government, I know that the new Government would place great emphasis on saving money. If we are to save money in this respect, there must be inducements for the civil service. The Government have already tried it. It is a difficult area, but with the help of the National Audit Office, the Committee would be well placed to try, in a completely non-partisan way, to understand what is going on inside the civil service and how we are promoting efficiency.
	That point was taken up by the third speaker this afternoon, my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon). On the door of the Chairman's office, there is the word "Assiduity". That applies to my hon. Friend more than to any other member. He is incredibly assiduous. He had a first in the debate: he was the first Member, as far as I know, to refer to the words of Mr. Crapper without its being taken up by the Chair. That will no doubt be noted in "Erskine May" as a new form of insult.

Angela Eagle: I can tell the House that when I was a Minister at the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, I had a debate on the thing that Mr. Crapper produced. I refer to toilet flushes, not what hon. Members might be thinking. So that has featured on the Floor of the House before.

Edward Leigh: I apologise; it was not a first for my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk.
	I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell), who is a new Member of our House. He is not a member of the Committee. There is a grave danger that these debates become a Committee love-in and we all just slap each other on the back. We welcome him coming in from outside, with his private sector experience. He spoke with great knowledge about the value of shared services, which is not a sexy subject. I am not sure that his predecessor as the hon. Member for Henley would have been very interested, but it is an important subject and huge savings can be made.
	As usual, we much enjoyed the speech of the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell), as we greatly enjoy him as a member of the Committee. He lightens the atmosphere so often with his biting tongue. He took us to task for not having the bite of congressional committees and seemed to suggest that we could get more publicity for our hearings and our reports. That is an extremely difficult tightrope to tread. We cannot be partisan. We cannot, and I never do, attack Ministers. We must be consensual and take the whole Committee with us, but despite all that our reports are hard-hitting and we get to the heart of matters. It is a difficult balance to achieve.
	I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Angela Browning) for her comments and what she said about the importance of management information. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Putney (Justine Greening) who, as an accountant, comes with a particular financial expertise. We are grateful for her remarks. She, too, referred to the problem that has been a theme of the debate: civil servants and whether they should say no. I think civil servants need to seek directions more. There is a procedure for that, and this is where the Public Accounts Committee is intimately involved. If a permanent secretary thinks a Minister is asking for something that is not financially viable, he can seek a direction. If he seeks a direction, it will come to our Committee. Permanent secretaries should be more willing to use that ultimate weapon. Civil servants must say "No, Minister" more often.
	Lastly, I thank the Minister. It is such a joy; one sits through so many debates in which Ministers do not refer in any great detail to what has been said, but she took half an hour to refer to virtually every point that had been made. In particular, she was careful to reply to some of the points that I had made earlier. By the way, I do not think that it does any harm to share one's notes with the Minister before the debate, as I do—jaw, jaw is better than war, war after all. If a Minister is warned about what a spokesman is going to say, they will be more able to reply to the points, and this Minister does that extremely well.
	I did not deal with the new governance in any great detail; we sorted that out through the Public Accounts Commission, and the National Audit Office now has a robust new governance. I now have a difficult job. Under the statute, the Prime Minister and the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee have to appoint the Comptroller and Auditor General. That is a wise procedure; by definition, the Prime Minister is a member of the Government and by definition the Chairman of the PAC is a member of the Opposition.
	We are now starting the process and trying to carry it out in a completely modern and open way. The old days, when such things were done in private and some senior civil servant was just tapped on the shoulder, are not with us any more. A very well regarded firm of head-hunters has been approached and advertisements have been placed in the newspapers. Anybody from the private or public sectors can apply. There will be a very small appointments committee; obviously, I will sit on it. The Prime Minister, who has other things on his mind, will be represented by the permanent secretary to the Treasury. We will be advised by Tim Burr, who has intimated to me that he does not wish to apply for the permanent role of Comptroller and Auditor General.
	I have said all that because the appointment will almost certainly be made before our next debate. I assure the House that I consider my new duty to be one of the most important that I have had to undertake during my time at the House of Commons. The man or woman who is the new Comptroller and Auditor General will have one term only, for a maximum of 10 years; after that, they will not be able to return to the public sector or any part of the private sector with which they have dealt. They will be unsackable for 10 years and nobody will be able to influence them. There is no more important job than that of the Comptroller and Auditor General in ensuring financial and general accountability. I hope that we get it right and I ask for hon. Members' support as we try to do so. We will do our best.
	Finally, I thank the Minister for what she said about the financial alignment project, which sounds boring but is unbelievably important. As every  Hansard report shows, there is no doubt that we have one of the best audit systems in the world; however, we also have one of the weakest Budget systems in the world. We have a strong National Audit Office. Some of us have studied supreme audit offices around the world, and I am not sure how we could do things much better in respect of considering what has gone wrong in the past. As the hon. Member for Great Grimsby said, one of the problems with our work is that we often look at things too much in the past.
	I have tried to speed the whole process up to ensure that the National Audit Office works quicker, reports come to us quicker and we report quicker. The system works pretty well, but we have a very weak Budget system. One reason for that is that it is virtually impossible for Members of Parliament to understand the process. It is all much easier and better done in the United States Congress, where the President proposes a Budget through the Office of Budget and Management. It goes to Congress, and what emerges at the other end bears no relation to what the President has proposed. The President proposes; Congress disposes.
	We will never get to that situation in this House, because the Government are drawn from the legislature; we will never go down the congressional route and perhaps we never want to. However, we have to get a much more transparent system of considering the Budget. Through a sub-committee of the Liaison Committee, I have been working with the Chairman of the Treasury Committee, and we have been working with the Government, who should take a lot of credit for getting the whole process moving. That was their initiative and they should be congratulated on trying to bring more transparency to the whole Budget process.
	As usual, we have had a good debate. We will carry on trying to do our job, and I commend the motion to the House.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	 Resolved,
	That this House takes note of the 5th, the 8th, the 14th to the 29th, the 31st to the 35th, the 37th, the 38th, the 42nd and the 50th Reports and the 1st and 2(nd) Special Reports of the Committee of Public Accounts of Session 2007-08, and of the Treasury Minutes on these Reports (Cm 7366 and 7453).

FLOODING (MORPETH)

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn. —[Chris Mole.]

Denis Murphy: I am grateful to the House for allowing me to discuss the very serious flooding that occurred in Morpeth over the weekend of 5 and 6 September. I am pleased to see the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith) in his place. He introduced a similar debate in this House on Monday evening.
	While other parts of the north-east of England were affected by the most intensive rainfall in living memory, the town of Morpeth was devastated. Morpeth has a population of about 19,000. It is located in the heart of Northumberland and lies in the valley of the River Wansbeck. It was a thriving market town and is the home of the administrative headquarters of Castle Morpeth borough council and Northumberland county council.
	The first indications that anything was amiss came with a warning from the Environment Agency on the afternoon of 5 September that a flood watch would be issued for Morpeth and Ponteland from 1 am on Saturday 6 September. Early indications predicted an event similar to that which occurred in 2005. Although river levels were high and gave cause for serious concern in 2005, no properties were damaged. However, it became clear on the Saturday, following a period of unprecedented rainfall, which equated to three times the monthly average falling in just 48 hours, that a very dramatic event was unfolding. From 8 o'clock on the Saturday morning, the water levels were already much higher than in the 2005 event, and torrential rain was still falling with no signs of abatement. Indeed, from 9 am, the pleasure boats that were moored in the River Wansbeck and should have played an important part in the subsequent evacuations were being overwhelmed and were sinking. Staff from Castle Morpeth council were fully stretched in closing off roads and attempting to sandbag vulnerable areas. The whole of Northumberland was awash. Villages were being cut off and numerous roads were closed.
	The emergency services were at full stretch. At 12 noon on Saturday, Gold Command was called and 15 minutes later the first evacuations started. The rescue helicopter from RAF Bulmer, the RNLI, the fire and rescue services from Northumberland and Tyne and Wear, the police, council staff and residents worked throughout the day and night to ensure that everyone was rescued. There was no loss of life. This was due in the main to the skill and dedication of all the people I have mentioned, but also to the spirit and courage of a number of friends and neighbours who acted quickly to evacuate the most vulnerable to places of safety.
	The Environment Agency played an important role in the early flood warning system. For the majority of those registered under the scheme, it worked very well. Five hundred and twenty three homes were contacted with a warning. For the residents of the Middle Greens area of Morpeth, it did not work at all. There are more than 300 homes in that area, which is situated next to the river. Of those, 198 homes were registered under the scheme, but for them the system failed completely. I have met the Environment Agency's new chairman Lord Smith and Ian Hodge from the region, who inform me that they have changed their procedure. The previous system divided Morpeth into a number of separate areas and issued warnings depending on the perceived risk. Middle Greens' warning was not physically activated by an operator. In the light of that mistake, they have taken action to ensure that that will never happen again. In future, all the registered areas in Morpeth will receive the same warning at the same time.
	The flood damage to Morpeth was extensive and devastating, with 1,012 properties affected—913 residential and 89 commercial. A total of 714 were privately owned, and of those 562 were seriously affected. Of those seriously affected, more than 300 households are currently displaced, and that number is rising daily. There are more than 30 properties where drying has not even commenced. Some 172 properties are owned by registered social landlords, and of those 150 are seriously affected. A total of 90 households are currently displaced, but it is accepted that that number will rise to 150. Tragically, of those numbers, 112 households are known to have no insurance cover at all.
	Among the worst affected buildings were essential community assets, such as the ambulance station, a large doctor's surgery, the library and the leisure centre. It is to the great credit of Castle Morpeth borough council that on Sunday morning, as soon as the water levels began to drop, it started the physical clean-up. On the same day, Gold Command handed over the ongoing work to Castle Morpeth. It set up the Castle Morpeth community recovery and restoration group, which has since adopted the name Springboard. It is a multi-agency partnership and it has been set up to assist the affected community, and to manage its recovery and restoration.
	Drawing on the experience of other severely affected flood areas is of prime concern to the partnership. Best practice has been the driving force. Ascertaining that everyone in the affected area was safe and well was done without the need to affect forced entry into any of the properties. Morpeth now faces huge challenges. Many of the shops remain closed for restoration work, which is affecting those businesses that are still trading. Many are struggling to survive at present, and are eager to get the message out that Morpeth is still open for business.
	To compound the problem, car parking is becoming increasingly problematic. The residential streets are narrow and easily congested. A loss of car parking owing to flood-related issues is further compounded by a massive increase in builders' vehicles and skips. That in turn is acting against efforts to attract additional footfall into the town to support the existing retail trade.
	Homelessness is expected to rise. About 400 households are currently displaced, and many of those people are staying with family and friends. From experience elsewhere, I know that that is unsustainable in the long term. The supply of temporary and emergency accommodation is virtually exhausted. Long-term contingencies are urgently required and I look to the Government to assist in the funding of those contingencies.

Alan Beith: I am sure that the hon. Gentleman has seen, as I have done, the amazing work being done by voluntary organisations and public authorities, working together in providing continuing services to the people most affected. I have found the amount of extra effort put in by staff members and volunteers very impressive, and I am sure that he has too.

Denis Murphy: I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that intervention. I agree with him, and it is a subject I intend to tackle in more detail later. I have been hugely impressed by the voluntary sector and council officials in Morpeth.
	Apart from the long-term contingencies, there is an increasing need for emotional and psychological support, which will have an even greater impact as people are unable to return to their homes for Christmas. It is important that the agencies responsible are able to identify and respond effectively to a need once it is identified. Additionally, there is a need to lift morale throughout the period of recovery. I am delighted to say that there appears to be no increase in criminal activity. However, there is genuine concern that household possessions kept on the first floors of houses in housing estates that are virtually deserted overnight could be at risk. The police are currently providing additional patrols in the affected areas, and I ask the Minister to press for the continuation of these much-needed patrols.
	I mentioned earlier the large number of properties that were not insured. Flood damage repair and renovation to an insured property could be severely compromised if it is adjoining an uninsured property with similar levels of severe damage. There is no doubt that severe financial hardship is being experienced by everyone affected by the flooding, but especially those people who are not insured.
	Unfortunately, many of the main public buildings were badly affected by flood damage. Morpeth library was immensely popular and well used by many residents. So severe was the damage that it will probably have to be demolished. It is therefore essential that a new library is built as soon as possible. The leisure centre suffered similar damage, but no decision has yet been made about its future. However, one thing is certain: it will be closed for a long time. The same applies to the doctors' surgery and the ambulance station.
	I have tried to outline briefly the extensive damage that the huge flood did to the town of Morpeth. I am here to seek Government support to help to rebuild the town and, more important, to ensure that we do everything possible to prevent a similar occurrence.
	The Environment Agency has been heavily criticised for its failure to warn the residents of Middle Greens of the impending flood. That criticism was fully justified, but we need to ensure that the early warning system never fails again. The agency has assured me that the changes it has introduced will guarantee that everyone is informed in future. I also urge residents who are not registered to register now—it is a free service.
	I have met the agency's new chairman Lord Smith to press for early implementation of a new flood defence scheme for Morpeth. He has agreed to visit Morpeth in the next few weeks and he is keen to move forward quickly with the scheme.
	The economic assessment is almost complete, and it is intended to consult the people of Morpeth on the options available no later than next January. The agency intends to run several items in parallel to enable it to commence the scheme several months earlier than originally planned. I am delighted to say that funding no longer appears to be a problem.
	In the next few weeks, work will commence on rebuilding a much stronger flood wall to replace the one damaged near the library. Urgent structural assessments will take place of all the various flood defences in the town and of the damaged weir at Highford. The agency is also considering my request, which residents affected by the floods put to me, to begin river bed dredging and clearance. There is a strong economic case for the scheme, which could bring huge investment to Morpeth.
	A new flood defence scheme would release valuable riverside land for redevelopment to complement the current town centre development. A new health centre, providing state-of-the-art diagnostics and treatment, has been under discussion for more than two years. We should accelerate that development and include a new library on the site. If it proves necessary to demolish the leisure centre, consideration should be given to building a new one, perhaps on a new site. There are many other options—I merely make the point that enormous opportunity exists for the town and we need to maximise it.
	While local business and commerce has been badly affected, 1,000 properties require extensive building works, new furniture and decoration. At a time of building slump, that could help many local businesses. I hope that people source those services locally, and of course we must endeavour to keep out the cowboy builders.
	I was impressed with the Government response during and immediately after the flooding. I was contacted by the duty Minister—the then Minister for the Environment, my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham, East and Saddleworth (Mr. Woolas)—from 10 Downing street at 9 pm on the Saturday evening to warn me that Morpeth had been badly flooded. I was on holiday in Dorset and I returned home immediately. On Sunday morning, I was called again, this time by the Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, Central (Hilary Benn), who inquired about the extent of the damage and sent his best wishes to the people of Morpeth. I spoke to him and the Minister responsible for flood recovery, my hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth (John Healey), who said that he wished to visit. He did so the next day. The people of Morpeth also received a much-needed boost in the form of a royal visit by Prince Charles and his wife. They were accompanied by the Minister for the North East of England, my right hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne, East and Wallsend (Mr. Brown), whom I am delighted to see in his place today. He has done a great deal to help me and the people of Morpeth. By any standards, it was a great response.
	I hope that my right hon. Friend the Minister will, in her response to the debate, show the same concern for Morpeth and assist its speedy recovery. Morpeth needs urgent funding in the form of Bellwin. It also needs another £600,000 to try to assist the local authority with the expenditure that it has already incurred. I will provide my right hon. Friend with the detailed breakdown of that expenditure.
	Castle Morpeth council is a very small local authority; its chief executive Ken Dunbar, his deputy Trevor Walker and all its employees have performed remarkably. They are conducting an inquiry into the flood, and it is essential that all agencies co-operate with it. Their hard work, skill and dedication have been exemplary. They deserve our thanks and recognition for their excellent work during the flooding and for their ongoing work since then. I urge my right hon. Friend the Minister to ensure that the necessary funding is in place for them to continue it.
	The voluntary sector also performed exceptionally well. The Red Cross has been invaluable, as have the Lions and the Rotary club, which are raising a large sum of money to assist flood victims. The citizens advice bureau is under increasing strain, but understandably has to deal with many more cases. I request that the Government make a direct donation to the voluntary services in and around Morpeth to enable them and others to continue helping the people of the area.
	In conclusion, the events at Morpeth on that terrible September weekend were both dramatic and dangerous. That no lives were lost is down to the skill and dedication of the emergency services and of many Morpeth residents—and, of course, some good luck. The Environment Agency's decision to commence an early flood defence system means that it will probably not happen again. Morpeth needs all the help the Government can provide to help with rebuilding and regeneration. I hope that the Minister will confirm in her reply that that help will be made available.

Jane Kennedy: I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wansbeck (Mr. Murphy) on securing this debate. We had an interesting and useful debate on Monday night on the wider issue of flooding in Northumberland, which was inspired by the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith). I apologise to those Members who were present—including my hon. Friend the Member for Wansbeck and, indeed, the Minister for the North East, my right hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne, East and Wallsend (Mr. Brown)—in that some of what I say today may be a little familiar. It is important to reinforce some of the important points.
	It may be worth saying that over the last 40 years, Morpeth has grown rapidly, with about 1,000 properties estimated to be at risk of a one-in-100-year event. Current standards of protection vary for different parts of Morpeth and the Environment Agency estimates the average protection at about 60 years. Several studies of the River Wansbeck flooding have been carried out, the most recent of which is the Wansbeck strategy study. My hon. Friend referred to it and I will return to it in a few minutes.
	The Northumbria regional flood defence committee provided funding through the local levy to carry out investigations in Morpeth further to understand the flood risk and to establish whether any quick wins could be developed. As the scope of the local area project has been developed in 2007, additional flood defence grant-in-aid funding became available and the project transferred to that funding stream.
	As I described on Monday, the circumstances arising between Friday 5 and Sunday 7 September affected most of England, but the most serious consequences were felt in the north-east, with the constituency of Wansbeck and the town of Morpeth in Northumberland being most affected. I applaud my hon. Friend for the strenuous lengths he went to to draw the issue to the attention of Ministers, albeit that we were first alerted by my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham, East and Saddleworth (Mr. Woolas). I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Wansbeck spoke personally to the Prime Minister about the impact of these events on Morpeth and he also secured a visit by the Minister for Local Government.
	I thus congratulate my hon. Friend again on the efforts he has already made, as well as on today's debate and the various suggestions and requests that he has made. The issues that he—and, indeed, the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed—raised today will be studied in detail and given careful thought and consideration by me and my ministerial colleagues as we consider how the Government should respond to the experiences of Morpeth.
	I also described on Monday how the severe rainfall that caused the flooding was first identified as a potential threat a number of days before the actual event itself. By Wednesday 3 September, the Environment Agency and the Met Office began to track the low pressure system and potential rainfall. By Thursday, they were beginning preparations in case of serious flooding. Heavy rainfall early warnings were issued for the north-east of England, and flash flood warnings were sent out across many further parts of the country on the Friday. Through the early warning system and the new and improved working arrangements between the Environment Agency and the Met Office, warnings were issued to alert local authorities and the emergency services, and preparations were made to prepare vulnerable people and areas.
	My hon. Friend drew attention to the incredibly heavy rainfall that affected the north-east, with 150 mm of rain—6 inches—falling on to already saturated ground and full river catchments over 48 hours. The average monthly rainfall for that time of year is 50 mm, or 2 inches. I am afraid that I always convert metric measures to imperial in my head. In fact, according to the Environment Agency, the flooding that occurred was estimated to be a one-in-150-years event.
	At the time—and since—a great deal of attention rightly focused on Morpeth, where the first flood watch alert was issued at 3.30 on Saturday morning, with warnings escalating throughout the day. I described that during Monday's debate. My hon. Friend mentioned the flood warnings. For the purpose of the Environment Agency's flood warning system, Morpeth is divided into five areas. Four warnings were issued. The severe flood warning intended for the Middle Greens area was issued as a downgrade at 12.49 pm. The residents would not have received that information: it went to professional partners only. A downgrade is normally issued when the Environment Agency believes that waters are receding and there is a settled outlook. Although the residents did not receive the level of flood warning service that the Environment Agency expects to offer, they were engaged in constant dialogue with the agency's professional partners, and the evacuation from Middle Greens was not compromised.

Denis Murphy: I do not entirely agree with the Environment Agency's statement that the evacuation was not compromised. Had it not been for neighbours and friends in the area, a number of disabled people could not have been moved out. That happened long before the emergency services arrived. The problem was compounded by the fact that two burns burst their banks, which prevented the emergency services from getting in. Although I accept most of the points made by the Environment Agency, I am afraid that on that occasion it was wrong.

Jane Kennedy: It is the purpose of debates such as this to allow precisely that sort of representation to be made. I know that the Environment Agency will want to learn lessons, and indeed has already learned lessons, from the experience of Morpeth in September. It is trying to find ways of making the system more resilient, including rationalising warnings so that the whole town receives the same warning should such warnings ever need to be issued again. It is also instituting additional checks to ensure that the mistakes made in Morpeth are not repeated. It has apologised for the errors, and reaffirmed that although the warnings were not received as planned, it was in constant dialogue. It clearly believes that the evacuation was not compromised, but as my hon. Friend rightly pointed out, the residents of Middle Greens are very grateful indeed for the actions of their neighbours, to whom I pay tribute for their swiftness in rising to the challenge.
	In Morpeth, approximately 1,000 homes and businesses were affected by the flooding, and around 250 families were looked after in rescue centres. As my hon. Friend said, and as I said on Monday, the evacuation of Morpeth was successful. As I acknowledged on Monday, flooding of homes and businesses is always devastating for those affected, but such events will take place from time to time, despite the substantial increase in flood defence spending that the Government are implementing. I was pleased to hear my hon. Friend's description of ministerial readiness to respond to the events of that September weekend. I was also, therefore, pleased to hear of the success of the multi-agency approach, and that those involved showed what can be accomplished through strong partnership work. On Monday, I paid tribute to the emergency services for the excellent job they have done in dealing with the flooding events, and I know that that would be echoed on both sides of the House. The actions of many third-sector organisations following the flooding events has once again shown how our communities can pull together at difficult times. I hear what my hon. Friend has said about further financial assistance being needed by such organisations. Such matters will have to be considered while we await the full claim from Castle Morpeth for the Bellwin assistance.
	In Northumberland, the local recovery and support operation is under way and will continue for some months yet. I am particularly grateful to all involved for having pulled together in the face of such challenges. I described the involvement of One NorthEast, the regional development agency, which has made more than £500,000 available to help with immediate costs for affected businesses, and my hon. Friend the Minister for Local Government has confirmed that the Bellwin scheme has been activated. Castle Morpeth has registered an intention to claim for Bellwin assistance and has been provided with the necessary information to help with a subsequent claim. The Department for Communities and Local Government awaits the details, and it is also expecting a request for an extension to the normal arrangements for reimbursement referred to by my hon. Friend, and it will consider that when it is received.
	On Monday, I described some of the emergency works the Environment Agency is carrying out in the area. However, more important for the longer term is the initiation of the EA's flood alleviation scheme, which commenced in December 2007. The River Wansbeck strategy study determined that a stand-alone flood alleviation scheme should be progressed with in Morpeth, and an initial site investigation was carried out and an environmental assessment is under way. In addition, in partnership with the Northumberland Strategic Partnership, a detailed business case is being carried out to determine the impact of flooding on local businesses. The scheme is at the end of year one of its current four-year programme. However, the EA is exploring the possibility of an accelerated time scale for construction of the works. I am delighted to hear my hon. Friend's description of the EA's willingness to engage at a local level, listening to what local residents have to say about the EA's proposals. I commend that way of working, and I encourage the EA to continue down that path. I know that he will be quick to raise with me any concerns he might have should that approach begin to slip, and I will be very open to hearing them.
	Although substantial flooding did occur in parts of the north-east at the beginning of September, it is important to remember the many flood defence systems that were not breached despite the very heavy rain. I referred to some of those in detail on Monday. The EA is responsible for maintaining and repairing flood defences, including the installation of temporary defences where needed. During the past year, it has inspected 180,000 assets and carried out work that now means that 95 per cent. are serviceable and will perform as designed during a flood event. The EA spent £377 million building and maintaining flood defences in England, as well as raising public awareness through greatly improved flood-mapping and warning systems.

Alan Beith: When reassessments have taken place, there has tended to be an acceptance that more flooding of fields may help to save properties. Most people accept and understand that. However, will the Minister also accept that if that is done—and, effectively, that happened in parts of Northumberland—the burden on agricultural businesses becomes much more serious, and we may need to look at ways to help agriculture to cope with its taking the bigger impact of floods, instead of homes?

Jane Kennedy: I am very pleased that the right hon. Gentleman has made that point. I discussed that very issue with the president of the National Farmers Union this morning. It is very important that the Environment Agency considers all stakeholders and all those affected as the country wrestles with the problems of rising sea levels and the threat of high levels of ground water and the sort of inundations that we saw that weekend in September. He is absolutely right that if the water moves somewhere else, somebody else is affected—perhaps not their life and limb and their homes, but agricultural businesses are also very important and the impact of flooding on them needs to be taken into account. As a new Minister in this area, I intend to look into that and ensure that it is not discounted as we consider all the effects of flooding.
	I have described the increased investment, and in recent years our experience of managing flood events has also increased. Last year, we immediately established an independent review of the lessons to be learned from the September 2007 flooding, led by Sir Michael Pitt. Sir Michael's final report was published on 25 June 2008 and includes 92 recommendations. The Government have already welcomed the report and announced initial allocations from the £34.5 million that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has set aside for the next three years to take the recommendations forward. We will say more about our plans later this year, and I hope that a prioritised action plan will be produced—in the autumn, it says on my notes, but it feels as though we are near winter given the weather outside. It will certainly be produced shortly.
	Over the past year, we have undertaken a vast amount of work to increase preparedness against future flooding, and we have taken on board the recommendations of Sir Michael Pitt's interim report on a diverse range of projects such as the encouragement of better surface water drainage, the exploration of resistance and resilience measures for householders in high-risk areas, the finalising of national guidance on multi-agency flood planning and many more.
	An important aspect of our work is the production of a floods and water Bill, and a draft is planned for pre-legislative scrutiny, for which it is an excellent candidate. We propose that there will be consultation in 2009. It is our intention that the draft Bill will simplify and streamline the rather complex and perhaps outdated flood and coastal erosion risk management legislation, including on the interrelationship of the roles and responsibilities of, among others, the Environment Agency, local authorities, internal drainage boards, the Department and Ministers.
	Although we will never be able to eradicate the threat of flooding, I remain confident that the events of September demonstrate the preparedness and professionalism of those charged with responding at national, regional and local level. I am confident that we are much better prepared today for the challenges that we will face in the coming months and years, although for those people whose homes and businesses were affected, we can have nothing but sympathy and a commitment to do more to help.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	 Adjourned accordingly at eighteen minutes past Five o'clock.